Team

Dr. Santer completed her B.Sc (Honours) in Immunology and Infection at the University of Alberta and her Ph.D in Immunology at the University of Washington under the supervision of Dr. Keith Elkon (NSERC scholarship). Her thesis focused on investigating how type I interferons (IFNs) contribute to pathology in the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). For her postdoctoral work (Alberta Innovates and CIHR fellowships), she came back to Canada to work in Nobel Laureate Dr. Michael Houghton's lab at the University of Alberta where her projects included working with various viruses, before developing her own research program studying the newest family of IFNs, IFN-lambdas. Dr. Santer joined the Department of Immunology at the University of Manitoba on November 1, 2020 as an Assistant Professor and GSK Research Chair in Immunology of Infectious Diseases. Outside of doing experiments and analyzing data, Dr. Santer has been actively involved in promoting women in STEM having volunteered for over 8 years with WISEST as a mentor for high school and elementary girls (at UAlberta), participates in workshops at UManitoba through WISDOM of which she is now an executive team member. She also engages Canadian youth interested in science as a career through outreach events and presentations.

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Olamide completed her last co-op work term Jan-Apr 2021 in the Santer lab and graduated with a B.Sc (Major Genetics (co-op)) from the University of Manitoba. She enjoyed learned about IFNs so much she was the lab's main technician until recently starting her Immunology M.Sc (Jan 2023). 

Research interests - Olamide wants to explore immunological signaling pathways and the role IFN-lambdas play in regulating chronic inflammation. She is an expert in confocal microscopy, flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry, RT-qPCR and has done lots of cell culture.

Xinyun (Leo) graduated with a B.Sc (Major in Microbiology) degree from the University of Manitoba in 2021. He previously worked in the Murooka lab in our department for 2 summers and helped establish an HIV-1 reporter virus. He worked as a technician in the lab during summer 2021 and then started his Immunology M.Sc as of Sept 2021. 

Research interests - Xinyun is studying IFN-lambda regulation of human immune cells, which is not as well understood. You will find him processing blood every week and isolating various immune cells for cell culture assays.

Testimony completed B.Sc (Major Biochemistry) and M.Sc (Molecular Biology and Genomics) degrees from Redeemer's University, Nigeria in 2014 and 2018, respectively. He then worked as a Research Fellow at the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases for 4 years where his research centered on genomics of viral infectious diseases. He moved to Winnipeg January 2023 to start his Immunology M.Sc degree.

Research interests - Testimony is passionate about improving human health outcomes after working on various virology-related projects. He specifically joined this program to learn immunology more in depth and will study core aspects of IFN-lambda biology and cross-talk with various microbes.

Maggie has completed her training in immunology and virus/host interactions through a B.Sc in Molecular Biology, M.Sc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Ph.D in Immunology when still living in China. She came to Canada in 2017 to join the University of Manitoba as a research associate working on interesting projects on long non-coding RNAs and more recently, COVID-19 vaccine development/testing. She joined the Santer lab in November 2022.

Research interests - Maggie will lead efforts in studying immunoregulation pathways modulated by IFN-lambdas and brings to the lab many new techniques to study antiviral host responses.

Sasha recently completed her B.Sc (Honours) in Genetics from the University of Manitoba. Throughout her undergraduate degree, she contributed to several studies including the connection of mTOR and protein translation with MeCP2 using a mouse model for Rett Syndrome. She joined January 2024 and her position supports multiple inflammatory bowel disease projects in both Santer and Armstrong (Dept of Internal Medicine & Immunology) labs.

Research interests - Sasha is looking forward to learning many new techniques and will study the connection of dietary fibres and interferons and the regulation of inflammatory processes in IBD. She will also support the clinic helping screen and consent patients.

Eunice previously completed a Ph.D in Life Sciences from National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), M.Sc in Molecular Medicine from National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and B.Sc in Microbiology-Biochemistry from Ouagadougou (Joseph Ki-Zerbo) University (Burkina Faso). Throughout her career thus far, her focus has been especially on medical microbiology. She started part-time support for our lab January 2024 with her main focus supporting important clinical trial and inflammatory bowel disease projects with our collaborator Dr. Heather Armstrong (Dept of Internal Medicine & Immunology).

Research interests - Eunice has been active in supporting clinical sample processing for multiple autoimmune disease projects and is excited to get back to some microbiology work for projects connecting the gut microbiome and the regulation of inflammation.

Bill has been working in the Dept of Immunology for over 20 years and helped Dr. Santer get the lab up and running. He is our go-to person for any questions related to university systems and Mesoscale.

Vi has completed a B.Sc in Medical Laboratory Sciences from the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, HCMC, Vietnam, M.Sc (Molecular Biology) from Coventry University, UK, and recently finished an Advanced Diploma of Technology Management from Red River College, Manitoba. She was a Medical Laboratory Technician in a Molecular Biology clinical lab and spent one year serving on the frontline team for COVID-19 detection during the pandemic. In her M.Sc, she studied how defective interfering particles affect influenza A and Rotavirus yields and developed solutions for reducing DIPs to improve live attenuated and inactivated vaccine products. She joined the Santer lab Nov 2022 as a technician/lab manager and will work part-time on projects with the Armstrong lab (Dept of Internal Medicine/Immunology).

Research interests - Vi is eager to expand her knowledge in Immunology, specifically the antiviral role of IFN-lambdas and the therapeutic prospect of Peginterferon lambda for COVID-19 patients. She will support CoVaRR-Net studies with our collaborators across Canada, as well as supporting joint projects on inflammatory bowel disease with the Armstrong lab.