Last month, Cornell’s Biomedical & Biological Sciences Program held its annual symposium where students, faculty, and staff from the College of Veterinary Medicine attended sessions, a keynote, and poster session throughout the day. MPH Student Alyssa Morse, Cornell MPH ’24, represented the Whittaker Lab and presented a poster titled “Intra-host genetic variation of SARS-CoV-2 spike S1/S2 region of extrapulmonary tissue from autopsied patients with a primary COVID-19 diagnosis.”

“I have been researching long-COVID in Dr. Whittaker’s lab this summer using samples from autopsied patients in early 2020 who died with a primary diagnosis of COVID-19,” says Morse. “We used tissues samples from outside the respiratory tract and we observed intra-host variation in cats, meaning that the virus is able to genetically change in order to infect other organs, so our assumption is that the same thing is happening in humans.”

Morse will be presenting this research again at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting in Atlanta this November.

“Presenting at this conference was an amazing experience. I strongly encourage anyone who has research that they are excited about to try and apply to conferences or symposiums and present it. The networking experience was also very interesting and helpful as people who are in the same field gave thoughtful insight on what I can do to help fix my issues and take the research a step further,” says Morse.

“Overall, I can’t recommend this enough and thank Dr. Whittaker and the rest of the team who encouraged me to step outside my comfort zone and do something I will remember for the rest of my life.”

Written by Katie Lesser