Morgan Goheen MD, PHD

Morgan Mcfarland Goheen is halfway through the MD/Ph.D. program at UNC-Chapel Hill, currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology with Drs. Steven Meshnick and Carla Cerami. Her Ph.D. research involves investigating the relationship between host iron status and erythrocyte susceptibility to malaria infection. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Molecular Biology in 2007. All 4 years at Princeton she worked in Dr. Lynn Enquist’s alpha herpesvirus lab. She also spent 4 summers working in Dr. Harlan Caldwell’s chlamydia pathogenesis lab at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, an intramural NIAID/NIH research site in Montana.

Following college, Morgan returned to work on trachoma for 2 years as a postbaccalaureate fellow under Dr. Caldwell. She was then awarded a Princeton in Africa fellowship and worked for one year at the international NGO mothers2mothers based in Cape Town, South Africa to help prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV. Morgan then started medical school at UNC in 2010. Her current Ph.D. research will take her to The Gambia where she will help implement malaria susceptibility assays at a rural field site as part of a large-scale iron supplementation clinical trial being run by researchers from the UK’s MRC. With over 10 years of laboratory research experience, Morgan has solidified her desire to research tropical infectious diseases affecting populations in the developing world and plans to specialize in infectious disease medicine and continue with a global health-oriented career.