Dr. Christina Bergey, Ph.D., is an assistant professor with the Rutgers University Department of Genetics, where her research uses genomics to understand medically-relevant traits in diverse humans, non-human primates, and disease vectors. She and her research group have a particular interest in understanding the factors that influence infection and mortality from infectious diseases that disproportionately impact the poor and marginalized, especially in tropical Africa.
Her current major projects include: understanding the co-evolution of malaria, its human and primate hosts, and mosquito vectors; determining how viruses that cause acute respiratory tract infections interact with the host immune system, other co-infecting viruses, and the microbiome; and applying comparative methods across primates to understand human medical conditions.
