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Karen Wozniak

Karen Wozniak (January 23rd,1976 – Present) is a distinguished American Medical Mycologist, specializing in fungal immunology. She is currently a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma, where she is an Assistant Professor for the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and conducts research interested in the interactions of the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans.

Early Life

Karen Wozniak was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She was the youngest of three children. Her father was a Sociology professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Western Kentucky University and her mother earned a degree in Social Work once Karen started school in 1981.

Karen was always interested in science growing up as a child; however, she became specifically interested after taking an AP Biology course offered at her high school.

Education

After graduating high school, Wozniak attended the University of Notre Dame (1994–1998), where she would obtain her Bachelor's of Science degree in Biological Sciences.

Early Research Experience

While attending the University of Note Dame, she worked in the laboratory of Dr. John Adams. This lab focused on malaria and exposed her to immunology throughout her undergraduate studies, which caused her to seek out a post-graduate program that focused on immunology of infectious diseases.

Post-Graduate Education

Wozniak applied and was accepted to the Microbiology, Immunology, and Parasitology graduate program at Louisiana State University Health Science Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. She attended for a total of six years (1998–2004) and obtained both her Master's degree and Ph.D. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Parasitology.

While at Louisiana State University Health Science Center, Wozniak joined the fungal immunology laboratory of Dr. Paul L. Fidel, Jr. and began studying protective immune responses to Candida albicans infections. Wozniak indicated that once she began studying immune responses towards fungal pathogens in graduate school, she became "hooked ever since".

Her research focused primarily on adaptive immune responses (T cell responses and antibodies) at various sites of Candida infection. While in the Fidel laboratory, Karen had the opportunity to attend the Molecular Mycology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This course cemented Karen’s interest in studying fungal diseases and fungal pathogenesis.

Post-Doctoral Research & Professorships

For her post-doctoral studies, Wozniak was interested in exploring innate immunity and decided to begin working on a different fungal pathogen, Cryptococcus neoformans. She joined the laboratory of Stuart Levitz, M.D. at Boston Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. She would move with his lab two years later to the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. Karen studied dendritic cell interactions with C. neoformans and began investigating mechanisms of dendritic cell killing of C. neoformans.

Karen next moved to San Antonio, Texas to work as a Research Assistant Professor with her colleague Floyd L. Wormley, Jr. in his laboratory at the University of Texas at San Antonio for nearly nine years (2008–2017). Karen continued her work with C. neoformans and dendritic cells, but also took on additional projects examining vaccine-mediated immune responses to C. neoformans.

She also was able to mentor post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the laboratory. In addition, Karen also had the opportunity to teach lectures in Microbiology, Medical Mycology, Microbial Pathogenesis, and was the instructor for her own Parasitology course.

Karen would accept a position as an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University in 2017. She was extremely excited to begin her first research lab, and she will continue studying innate immune responses to Cryptococcus and other pathogenic fungi. New projects in her lab will include examining components of dendritic cells that have anti-fungal properties and determining the mechanisms by which macrophages either kill fungi or allow intracellular growth.

As a faculty member in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at OSU, Dr. Wozniak has enjoyed having undergraduate and graduate students join her lab and learn about immune responses to fungal pathogens. Her students usually start with little knowledge of fungal pathogens or immunology, but they quickly become experts and are excited to work in the fungal immunology field.

Dr. Wozniak is excited to continue her research and training of students in her lab. With her research efforts in the field of fungal immunology, she plans to make an impact understanding how the innate immune cells can defend against these pathogens. These findings will help to develop immune therapies to treat fungal infections.

She comes to OSU with her husband John Coates and their cat, Toby. When she is not in the lab, she loves experimenting with food and recipes.

Professional Affiliations

As a fungal immunologist, she is involved in several organizations with her medical mycology colleagues. She serves as the treasurer for the Medical Mycological Society of the Americas (MMSA) and she has also been involved in the South Central Medical Mycology (SCMM) conference since it began while she was a graduate student. In fact, she hosted the SCMM annual conference at OSU in November 2019.