Balázs Rada Ph.D. – Associate Professor
Balázs completed his PhD at the Semmelweis University Medical School in Budapest Hungary in 2005 in the group of Dr. Erzsebet Ligeti. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH in the Washington DC metro area 2005-2011 in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Leto. He started his own research group at the University of Georgia at the end of 2011 to study innate immunity in respiratory diseases including cystic fibrosis, influenza and Streptococcus pneumoniae infections.
E-mail: radab@uga.edu
Demba Sarr Ph.D. – Associate Research Scientist
Demba received his Bachelor and Master Degrees of Science from Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. He also completed his PhD from the same institution with the group of Dr. Ronan Jambou at the Pasteur Institute Network, where he worked on malaria immunology. Demba moved to the United States in 2007 and worked with Dr. Julie Moore in the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases and the Department of Infectious first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an assistant research scientist with a focus on malaria immunology. Demba joined the laboratory in 2017 and investigates the role of innate immunity in a variety of infectious disease models. His primary focus is to determine the mechanistic role of an oxidative, epithelial antimicrobial immune mechanism in influenza infection and other infectious diseases including malaria.
E-mail: dsarr1@uga.edu
Sarah Channell B.S. – Lab manager
Sarah completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry at the College of Coastal Georgia in May of 2021. In her undergraduate studies, Sarah focused on annotating the genome of a novel bacteriophage, Arthrobacter phage. Through this annotation, she learned more about the phage when discovering the functions and lengths of each gene. She joined the Rada lab at the end of November 2021 as a research professional in hopes to gain experience in the field of innate immunity before entering into graduate school. While the primary goal of Sarah’s work is to manage the laboratory and to make sure everything goes smoothly, she has also been interested in taking on an independent research project in the field of autoimmunity un cystic fibrosis.
E-mail: sarah.channell@uga.edu
Aminata Sarr – Laboratory helper
Aminata is a professional laboratory helper, experienced in autoclaving glassware, filing pipette tips and helping with general laboratory work duties such as making buffers and sterilizing instruments. She keeps the work area clean, scraps ice on freezers and is engaged in learning new techniques including genotyping PCR, mouse colony maintenance and human blood work.
E-mail: aminata.sarr@uga.edu
The Rada Laboratory 