Dr. Irina Vlasova-St. Louis

Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis earned her MD and PhD degrees from Ural State Medical Academy, Russia. She completed her postdoctoral training and fellowship sponsored by the Lymphoma Research Foundation, at the University of Minnesota, USA. By integrating state-of-the-art techniques such as next-generation sequencing, she made numerous biomedical discoveries studying normal and pathological conditions at the molecular, cellular, and organismal levels. Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis served as an Assistant Professor at the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Medicine. Her laboratory research focused on the identification of biomarkers of immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome in HIV/AIDS patients after initiation of antiretroviral therapy. She collaborated with the Division of Hematology-Oncology and Transplantation, on complications of immune reconstitution in cancer patients after various conditioning therapies and hematopoietic stem cell-transplantation regimens.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis led genomic sequencing and surveillance of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the State of Nevada.  She was awarded a COVID-19 Associate grant by the Association of Public Health Laboratories and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently, Dr. Vlasova-St. Louis serves as a genomics specialist at the Newborn Molecular Analysis Unit, providing expertise to public health newborn screening genomic program.