Join us for an online panel discussion: Women in leadership – Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world

Elisar Barbar earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry at the American University of Beirut at the height of the civil war in Lebanon. She taught high school chemistry for several years before emigrating to the U.S. to complete her Ph.D. in chemistry at Portland State University (’93) and her postdoctoral research in biophysics at the University of Minnesota (’97). She joined the Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics at Oregon State in 2004 as an associate professor, and is now department head as of January 2020. The highly productive Barbar Lab, renowned for global collaborations and integration of interdisciplinary approaches in pursuing new knowledge, has recently expanded their work on viruses to include SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid phosphoprotein N and its interaction with viral RNA. The lab uses a powerful combination of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance technology, circular dichroism, SEC-multi angle light scattering, analytical ultracentrifugation, and mass spectrometry — all cutting-edge technology available at OSU facilities and centers. Barbar is an NSF CAREER awardee, an Erskine Fellow from the University of Canterbury and a Milton Harris awardee in Basic Research from the College of Science.

Elizanette Lopez (M.S. ’20) received her bachelor’s degree in biology at Angelo State University in 2017 and completed her master’s degree in microbiology at Oregon State University in the midst of the pandemic in 2020. Throughout her college career she has been involved in various research projects and extracurricular activities on campus including serving in multiple leadership positions. She volunteered with the TRACE COVID-19 project before landing an Oak Ridge Institute for Science & Education (ORISE) fellowship to train at the Center for Disease and Control (CDC) Biorepository in the Atlanta area.

Katie McLaughlin is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Oregon State University with an adjunct appointment in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences. Her areas of research interest are social network analysis, sampling methodology, and social science applications of statistics, and in particular she focuses on peer-recruitment sampling methods for hidden populations. Recently, as a co-PI of OSU’s TRACE-COVID-19 project, she has worked on designing sampling plans and analyzing data from TRACE’s door-to-door community sampling in Oregon and routine surveillance sampling of OSU students, faculty, and staff with the goal of estimating the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2.

Carrie Manore (Ph.D. ’11) is a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Information Science and Modeling group in the Analytics, Intelligence, and Technology division. Her expertise is in modeling methods ranging from nonlinear differential equations to agent-based and statistical models of disease spread, ecology, and human health. She has a Ph.D. in mathematics with a minor in ecosystem informatics from Oregon State University. She was a postdoc at Tulane University's Center for Computational Science when she was awarded an NSF SEES Postdoctoral Fellowship for modeling sustainable management of infectious disease spread. Manore was awarded a Director's Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she became a staff scientist in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group in 2016. She is now a staff scientist in the Information Systems and Modeling (A-1) group and co-lead for COVID-19 modeling teams. Manore is a PI on a recently awarded grant for multi-scale modeling of mosquito-borne disease spread incorporating Earth Systems Models.

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