Lab Members

Jeroen De Buck

Principal Investigator

Professor (Bacteriology)
Production Animal Health

Chair, Bacterial Diseases of Dairy Cows
Research Chair

Associate Member
Cattle Health Research Group

Profile

Marija Drikic (PhD Student)

Marija is a fourth PhD student in Veterinary medicine. She is focusing on the development of novel detection platforms for bovine infectious diseases. Marija developed a split trehalase reporter enzyme and applied it for the detection of different analytes such as total and antigen specific antibodies. She is currently optimizing the methods for the detection of Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV) in cattle samples.

Marija is coming from Italy where she obtained her BSc in Molecular biology and MSc in Functional genomics at the University of Trieste.

Sonia Mukherjee (Msc Student)

Sonia is a first year Masters student in the Microbiology and Infectious Diseases program in the Cumming school of medicine. She received her Bachelor's in Biotechnology degree from India in 2017, before joining as a graduate student in the De Buck lab. Her primary research interests lie in enhancing the existing biosensor platform to identify protein biomarkers of diseases and to create an antigenic screen using the split trehalase reporter enzyme to detect antibodies against different pathogenic bacteria and viruses causing bovine and human diseases.

When not in the lab, Sonia likes listening to music, reading books and travelling.

Ben Caddey (MSc Student)

Ben is a Masters student in the Veterinary Medical Sciences program at the University of Calgary. Prior to joining the De Buck lab, Ben received his Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Western Ontario, and completed his undergraduate thesis in the field of environmental microbiology. His interests lie in bovine bacteriology/infectious disease and he is working to further our understanding of the polymicrobial nature of Digital Dermatitis lesions in beef cattle.

Rakel Arrazuria (Postdoc)

Rakel received her DVM degree from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Lugo, Spain), and her MSc in Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology from The University of Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Rakel developed her PhD in Neiker (the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development). Her project was focused on Mycobacteria in rabbits, searching for an efficient paratuberculosis infection model.

Rakel is involved in the development of live attenuated vaccine for Johne’s disease. She is also working on the investigation of synergistic interactions among Treponema species that could contribute to Digital Dermatitis pathogenicity. She is currently working on mice infection model to study Treponema species effect in dermal lesions and gene expression through RNA seq.

Yongpeng Fu (Lab tech)

Lab assistant

After obtaining his M.Sc. in Biochemistry at the University of Saskatchewan in 2017, he joined Dr. De Buck’s team as a lab assistant to develop novel biosensor tests for detecting antibodies and bacterial pathogens directly in biological and clinical samples. His magic is to convert invisible molecular interactions into visible signals.