Lab Members - Graduate Students

Alysa joined the Fitzgerald Lab in 2026. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico, where she also received her BS from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She moved to MA in 2022 and worked at Dr. Mark Albers’ laboratory at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital before joining the Medical Scientist Training Program at UMass Chan. She is very interested in innate immunity’s role in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disease. When not in the lab, Alysa enjoys hanging out with her Puerto Rican rescue dogs, Pin and Pon, and catching a flight to visit the beaches of Puerto Rico.

Kristy is a PhD student who joined the lab in 2022. She graduated with a BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and a minor in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. Her research is focused on the role of STING activation in autoinflammatory disease. She is a joint student in Fitzgerald and Rothstein labs.

Colleen is a PhD student who joined the lab in 2025. She received her BSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UMass Amherst. Before joining, she worked at MGH looking at the effect of antibody glycosylation in hypersensitivity reactions. Her current research focuses on the role of inflammasomes in the development of IgA Nephropathy.

Kavya is a PhD student who joined the lab in 2024. She completed her bachelor’s degree in biotechnology at D.Y Patil University in Mumbai, India, and then earned her MS in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Before joining Umass Chan, Kavya worked for several years in the platform discovery group at Kymera Therapeutics. She is interested in studying type I Interferon signaling in innate immunity.

Wei is a PhD student who joined the lab in 2023. She received her BSc in Immunology from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. She is interested in understanding the activation of inflammatory pathways during gene therapy and gene editing. She is jointly mentored by Dr. Kate Fitzgerald and Dr. Guangping Gao in the Gene Therapy Center.