Yi-Pin Lin
Associate Professor

Faculty Profile
Yi-Pin.Lin@tufts.edu

Loranne Magoun
Senior Research Assistant & Lab Manager

B.A. in Biology, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
M.Sc. in Labor Studies, UMass Amherst

I have 30 years of experience managing research labs within the academic environment. I attend to the regulatory and operational needs of the lab, as well as assist with bench work on various projects. I am attuned to inefficiency, help build bridges to make the lab group more productive, and strive to create healthy and fun workplaces where every member is valued and reaches their career goals.

Carly Fernandes
Senior Research Technician

B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Collaborating with different academic institutes, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, my work in the Lin Lab focuses on developing new generation Lyme disease vaccines and pre-exposure prophylaxis targeting anti-complement mechanisms of Lyme disease bacteria. I also help maintain our Ixodes tick colonies and ensure we have a lively population of vectors for our research.

Miranda McCarty
Senior Research Technician

B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tulane University
M.Sc. in Conservation Medicine, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts 

My work in the Lin Lab focuses on various proteins of vaccine potential for Lyme disease and their effects in different vertebrate animal models, including rodents and avian animals. This entails projects that span from challenging vaccine efficacy with tick feedings to examining mouse immune response as well as through RNA sequencing. I’m excited to explore immune dynamics in reservoir hosts for Lyme disease and understand the story of how these hosts evolved alongside Borrelia and its vectors.  

Connor McKaig
Research Technician

B.S. Biology and Biotechnology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

My research interests are on the interactions between ticks, Lyme disease bacteria, and different vertebrate animals and identifying the determinants that contribute to such interactions. My current research project is to define the mechanisms that allow the vector and pathogen tropism using different species of Lyme disease bacteria and Ixodes ticks as a model. I am also developing anti-complement based ImmunoTherapeutics for the prevention against different tickborne pathogens, including Lyme disease bacteria. 

Ashley Marcinkiewicz
Research Scientist

B.S., Wells College, Aurora, NY
M.Sc., University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH

Since joining Dr. Lin’s Laboratory in June of 2016, I study Lyme borreliae outer surface proteins that function to evade the host immune system. My research focuses on how variation of these proteins promotes host adaptation. I identify protein domains/motifs that determine host-specific infections and utilize phylogenomic tools to assess the emergence and evolutionary history of such proteins. I also examine Lyme borreliae proteins as potential vaccine candidates.

Sergio Hernandez
Ph.D. student, Biomedical Sciences (current)

B.S. in Health Sciences (Honors Program), Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
M.Sc. Applied Health Sciences – Infectious & Zoonotic Diseases, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

I am currently investigating the comparative genomics of the three major pathogenic Borrelia species that cause human Lyme disease. I am deeply interested in delineating the protective and pathogenic immune responses for each species’ in human Lyme borreliosis and characterizing whether these responses can provide immune protection upon reinfection and how these responses shape the clinical course and outcome of the disease in patients.