Alyssa Block

Alyssa graduated from the University of South Dakota in 2010 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology focusing on cellular and molecular physiology and again in 2012 with of Master of Arts in Biology. While at USD, Alyssa was a member of Dr. Paula Mabee’s lab researching the developmental biology of Cypriniformes fishes. Following her Masters, Alyssa worked as a cytogenetics technician in a clinical genetics lab at Sanford Hospital in her hometown of Sioux Falls, SD. Itching to go back to school, Alyssa applied to and was accepted into the Medical Microbiology and Immunology Ph.D. program at Creighton University in 2016. At Creighton she worked under the mentorship of Dr. Jason Bartz, investigating interspecies transmission, adaptation, and strain emergence of synthetic prions in hamsters. Alyssa graduated from Creighton with her Doctorate in 2021, staying on as a postdoctoral fellow in the Bartz lab until March 2023. She joined the Telling lab in April 2023 and is excited to apply her prion strain expertise to chronic wasting disease (CWD).