About Melea
Melea Barahona is a PhD Candidate in the Cell and Molecular Biology PhD program at Colorado State University. She earned her B.S. in Biochemistry with minors in Physics and Mathematics from Alvernia University and a Data Analysis Certificate from Colorado State University. She began her PhD training in toxicological research focused on the immune mechanisms underlying occupational exposure-induced lung disease, during which she developed a novel murine model to study the effects of agricultural dust on lung immunity.
Her current dissertation work centers on elucidating immune correlates of protection using novel vaccination strategies against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) and non-tuberculosis mycobacteria (NTM), with the goal of informing next-generation vaccine design. She employs a combination of flow cytometry, single-cell RNA sequencing, and bioinformatics tools—including R Studio and Linux-based platforms—to support a robust and data-driven research approach.
Melea was awarded the NIH T32 Fellowship in Quantitative Cell and Molecular Biology (qCMB), a graduate training award designed to produce computational biologists capable of comprehending and analyzing big data across diverse biological systems.