Brooke Genovese Receives ARCS Award

OHI graduate student selected for prestigious STEM award for infectious disease research

Brooke Genovese, a PhD candidate co-mentored by Drs. Brian Bird and Jonna Mazet, is one of 83 individuals in STEM disciplines selected by the Northern California Chapter of ARCS Foundation to receive an ARCS Scholar Award for the 2022-2023 academic year. This award recognizes excellence in research and exceptional promise to make a significant contribution to the advancement of science, and to the material and intellectual welfare of all people.

The ARCS Foundation has selected an ideal awardee in Brooke Genovese. She is one of our brightest graduate students, who not only has the capacity to innovate, but uses her talents to make the world a better place – always focusing on the greater good and applying a social and environmental justice lens to all of her activities, including her important research.

–Drs. Jonna Mazet and Brian Bird

As an Integrative Pathobiology graduate student in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and a fellow within the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, Brooke's research is multidisciplinary and represents three arms of infectious disease biology: host immunology, virology, and disease ecology. She is specifically interested in natural reservoir hosts and their immune traits as they relate to reproduction, to better understand how the mother's immune system responds to virus infection during pregnancy. Her work and research interests are timely, as they are focused on better understanding infectious disease dynamics in natural reservoir hosts such as bats, using a systems biology approach, as well as the conditions that facilitate cross-species pathogen transmission.

Prior to her graduate training, Brooke worked on several emerging disease research and scientific capacity building efforts that sought to identify novel zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential. A first-generation college student, Brooke currently serves as a Co-PI on two pilot grants aimed at advancing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in academia. Her long-term career aspirations are to advance our understanding of host-virus ecology for high-consequence viruses and improve human and animal health in vulnerable ecosystems and communities.

ARCS is a national organization of women founded in 1958, providing more than $120 million to over 10,000 graduate students in STEM disciplines around the country.