Dr. Jade Sha received her Ph.D. in microbiology in 2012 from Texas State University where she studied Salmonella spp. in natural environments. She completed her first postdoctoral fellowship at Michigan State University where she studied the transmission of pathogenic E.coli between cattle and deer and did some epidemiology work on Salmonella from human samples. Later, she did her second postdoctoral fellowship at University of Southern California Dental School, where she studied several dental pathogens focusing on the polymicrobial interactions. She later left to work at a medical device company where she started her own microbiology lab and did several projects for company’s products. In 2019, she moved to Michigan with her family and joined Dr. Lena Brundin’s lab at VAI. Her current research projects include inflammation, depression and Parkinson’s diseases. Besides research, Dr. Sha is also the lab manager and is in charge of the day-to-day activities in the lab.