Shabnam Zaman

PhD student

Current Research

Shabnam is investigating the rise and diversification of host defense peptides throughout the vertebrate tree, with special emphasis on amphibians. Her work on these components of the innate immune system involves a combination of genomic, transcriptomic, evolutionary and functional analyses. In addition, she is interested in the use of paleogenetic methods to resurrect ancient HDPs produced by vertebrates millions of years ago, in order to explore changes in structure (and, by extension, function) in an evolutionary context.