Current Lab Members
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Matt Godwin, Postdoctoral fellow
Matt Godwin, Postdoc
Matt grew up just north of Jackson, MS and went to graduate school after deciding in his senior year of undergrad at Mississippi College, after taking the MCAT and going on interviews, that he didn’t want to go to Med School. He completed a Master’s at Mississippi College while applying to grad school and started in the PhD program at UAB in 2014 in the lab of Dr. Chad Steele. His dissertation work focused on the roles of IL-1 and CX3CL1 in Aspergillus-associated fungal asthma. Initially he was uninterested in pursuing a career as a principle investigator. However, over the last year has begun to reconsider that career track and currently exploring that option as a postdoc.
Matt joined the McLachlan laboratory in 2020 to explore the role of sex in regulation of T and B cell functions during infection and immunization. A nerd at heart, Matt is a fan of Dr. Who, LOTR, etc. When possible, he likes to play tabletop games (e.g. settlers of catan, munchkin, risk, D&D ). He plans to start working on acquiring his private pilot’s license soon (maybe).
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Tim Prior, MD/PhD student
Tim Prior,
MD/PhD student
Tim was born and raised in Southwest Connecticut. While in high school, he spent a semester abroad at the Island School on Eleuthera where he studied lemon shark hunting patterns of bonefish. Tim matriculated to Washington University in St. Louis in the fall of 2009 where he majored in Chemistry and did research on bifunctional compounds as novel therapeutic agent for Alzheimer's Disease. After graduating from college in 2015, he spent two years at Massachusetts General Hospital looking at the role of the Argonaute family of proteins in innate immunity. Tim enrolled in the MD/PhD program at Tulane in 2015. He joined the McLachlan Lab in 2017 and is working on understanding how adjuvants regulate antigen-specific B cell immunity in different tissues..
When not in the lab, Tim enjoys SCUBA diving, cooking/learning to cook Cajun food, and eating out at the many different restaurants New Orleans has to offer.
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James McLachlan, PI
James grew up in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina and received his Bachelors degree from Appalachian State University. He obtained his doctorate from Duke University in 2004 and then moved on to do a postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Marc Jenkins’ lab at the University of Minnesota. He joined the Tulane Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the winter of 2009. In 2015, He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
In his spare time, James enjoys spending time with his wife and two sons, running with his dog, reading, dining at the many fine New Orleans restaurants, and watching movies. Lastly, as a newly minted die-hard New Orleans Saints fan, he loves to sit and watch them play on Sundays.
David Bauer, PhD student
David was born and raised in the Sportsman Paradise, otherwise known as Southern Louisiana. When he wasn’t fishing or hunting, David spent much of his time preparing for a career in biological research. After graduating high school in 2004, David joined the Marine Corps and participated in several deployments, including a tour in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom). After 8 years in the Marines, David decided that it was time to continue pursuing his passion of science and attended the University of New Orleans in Louisiana, where he obtained a Bachelor’s of Science and graduated magna cum lade in 2014. David spent the next year and a half working as a laboratory technician and spending time with his newborn daughter and wife before joining the Biomedical Sciences PhD program at Tulane University in the Fall of 2016.
In the McLachlan Lab, David explores the interplay between combination vaccine adjuvants and their mechanism of action, such that we can ultimately drive the immune response to a desired outcome.
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James McLachlan, Principal Investigator
David Bauer, PhD student
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Shaina D'Souza,
PhD student
Shaina was born and raised in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where her parents work for the largest oil company in the world. For high school, she attended a boarding school in Western Massachusetts where she learned that snow is very different from sand, but that neither of them were amenable to her lifestyle. She then moved south to the University of Richmond for her undergraduate studies where she did research on the thermal regulation of Sodalis glossinidius, an endosymbiontic bacteria living in the gut of tsetse flies, while also dabbling in bacterial art as a side project. Finding the weather in Richmond still too cold, she is now at Tulane University pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Sciences. Shaina joined the McLachlan lab in 2019, and is currently exploring immunological differences between the sexes.
In her free time, Shaina enjoys watercolor painting, playing instruments poorly, and critiquing gender roles through a feminist lens.
Jaikin Harrell,
PhD student
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Jaikin Harrell,
PhD student
Jaikin was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio where she avidly spent time playing sports and even winning a national AAU title in basketball. After high school, she moved to Morgantown, West Virginia to pursue dual degrees in biology and forensic biology. After 3 years, she learned that her passion was not in the field of forensics and graduated early to purse a master’s in pharmacology at Tulane University in 2016. Interested in the components of drugs and how to make them, Jaikin joined the Tulane University BMS PhD program in the fall of 2018. She joined the McLachlan Lab in 2019 and studies vaccine mediated immunity to bacterial infections such as Salmonella and Francisella.
In her spare time, she enjoys spending time reading and finding fun places to hike in the South.
Shaina D'Souza,
PhD student
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Vicki Immethun, Research Technician
Vicki Immethun, Research Technician
Vicki was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. She moved to Baton Rouge, LA after high school to attend LSU where she completed a degree in chemistry. After graduating in 2010, she spent a year completing postgraduate research and coursework at Washington University in St. Louis. Since then, she moved to New Orleans, where she worked in a number of scientific environments, both academic and industrial. Her passion for biological sciences led her to pursue roles at the Tulane Center for Aging and Eurofins GeneScan.
In 2018, she returned to Tulane to join the McLachlan lab in the capacity of lab manager. In her spare time, Vicki cultivates a wide variety of crafts; woodworking, painting, clarinet, and gardening among others. She loves the outdoors and her many mammals and dreams of having a homestead to call her own.
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