Kurt is a PhD student in the Department of Medical Parasitology at the NYU School of Medicine. He has held an avid interest in malaria and its interactions with the immune system ever since his undergrad years at the University of Toronto. Presently under the supervision of Ana Rodriguez, he is studying how the immune system seeks to regulate harmful inflammation that occurs during malaria. Using a mouse infection model, he has identified a subset of innate immune cells, termed regulatory dendritic cells, that emerge during an acute infection and interact with T cells in order to dampen inflammation. He hopes that a better understanding of these dendritic cells will allow for the development of clinical interventions that could prevent malaria from killing people as a result of its fatal inflammatory processes.