about amy

Dr. Amy Stone is a professor at University of Las Vegas, Nevada. Amy studies the body’s immune reactions to infections and disease agents. When she was growing up outside Denver, Colorado, she spent her time playing video games, reading fantasy novels, and playing the flute. Science was always a part of Amy’s life growing up--she loved exploring outside, and her parents encouraged her interest in science by getting her a chemistry kit, microscope, and K’nex set.  When she's not studying viruses in the lab, Amy still loves to read fantasy novels and play video games!

Amy needed to change her major to one where her "D" in Physics would still count as passing, and Biology was her only option. So she switched majors to Biology until she could think of something she was more interested in. Once she took the Biology classes she signed up for, though, she realized that she LOVED biology! "Especially infectious diseases. I had always been fascinated by historical plagues like the Black Death and Small Pox. It turned out that there was an entire field dedicated to how the body fights disease - Immunology. And that is when I knew I wanted to be a scientist and study infectious diseases and how humans can fight them off. "

Several years ago, Amy released the results of a study that looked at the body’s innate immune response to West Nile Virus (WNV). WNV is an arbovirus, meaning it’s transmitted by mosquitos. It’s the most common arbovirus in the US, and a major cause of viral encephalitis, which is a dangerous swelling of the brain due to viral infection. There is currently no vaccine or cure to WNV, so it’s a major public health issue. Additionally, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to become more problematic with a warming climate, so a better understanding of how they work and how the body fights them is even more important.

Amy was interested in learning more about a group of pathogen recognition receptors (the cells that first detect a pathogen) involved in the WNV immune response. They’re called “RIG-I-like receptors” (rig-eye-like)--kind of an odd name, but the important thing to know is that they’re the first line of defense against most viral infection. They control infection and keep the virus from entering the brain and nervous system. Scientists know that there are three of these RIG-I-like receptors involved in WNV response, but it was unclear exactly what their individual roles were. Their names are RIG-I (the group of receptors is named after this one), MDA5, and LGP2. Amy and her colleagues tried to get to the bottom of this by inactivating either RIG-I, MDA5, or LGP2 in mouse cells infected with West Nile Virus and seeing how the immune response differed each time. After enough tests, they were able to see clearly what each receptor’s job was in directing the immune response to WNV. This is big news because researchers can apply this understanding of what the body already does to developing a vaccine or a treatment that keeps the virus at bay.