Janet McCombs

Dr. Janet E. McCombs joined the Tulane University faculty as an Assistant Professor in August 2019. She earned her BS in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after which she spent two years working for the Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics at UW-Madison as part of the protein purification pipeline. From there, Dr. McCombs earned her PhD in biochemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder. While at CU, she worked with fluorescent sensors and live-cell microscopy to study abrogation in calcium signaling in both Alzheimer’s disease and Salmonella infection. Interested in pursuing research in bacterial pathogens, Dr. McCombs performed her postdoctoral work at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX where she developed methods to determine specific substrates of bacterial sialidases, allowing mechanistic insight into pathogenesis. She then joined the small biotech company Affinivax, located in Cambridge, MA, as a Scientist, where she worked on developing vaccines to various bacterial infections, including a pneumococcal vaccine currently in clinical trial.