MENTEE – Devi Jenika

Devi Jenika completed her Bachelor of Science at University of Western Australia (UWA) and continued on with her Honours degree at University of Melbourne.

She is currently a 2nd year PhD student, investigating the potential of nanoparticle as vaccine carriers. Her project originally focused on the the capacity of dendritic cells to take up, process and present the antigen presented by the nanoparticles to T cells. She has since moved on to in vivo models, where she is looking at whether the nanoparticle vaccine is able to mount endogenous T cell response and protect against cancer and influenza.

Devi hopes that her project may bring an alternative vaccine platform that can potentially be used effectively, safely and efficiently against cancer and infectious diseases.

Additionally, her project is also focused on using CRISPR-cas9 system to screen for potential molecular machinery playing a role in the regulation of Clec9A (receptor highly expressed by a certain type of dendritic cells).