I’m an Entomology Ph. D. student currently working as research assistant in Dr. Patricia Pietrantonio’s lab. My dissertation topic is to explore and validate new targets for the control of arthropod blood-feeding vectors, specifically in mosquitos and ticks. I’m interested in validating arthropod-specific G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) as targets and discovering novel functional roles of which using techniques both in vitro (forward pharmacological characterization and high-throughput screening) and in vivo (mosquito/tick bioassays).