Dr. Homer is a physician scientist in the OHSU Division of Infectious Diseases with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. She completed her MD/PhD at University of California, San Francisco. There, she discovered her passion for fungi studying the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans during her graduate work under the mentorship of Dr. Hiten Madhani. After completing her internal medicine residency and infectious diseases fellowships at UCSF, she was inspired to study the fungus Coccidioides, which causes the infection Valley Fever, for her postdoctoral work. Dr. Homer worked under the mentorship of Dr. Anita Sil and built the first transcriptomic atlas and optimized genetic tools in this non-model organism. These technical advances allowed her to identify a secreted protease family critical for Coccidioides to grow in its host morphology, and a particular protease that is essential for Coccidioides virulence. 

The Homer lab seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms of fungal pathogenesis, with the goal to develop better treatments and ultimately a cure for challenging disseminated Valley Fever infections. The Homer lab focuses on understanding the secreted factors generated by Coccidioides and how they impact the host-pathogen interface, through a combination of genetics, genomics, biochemistry, and imaging. The lab’s initial aim is to characterize the function of 2 key fungal secreted protease families and understand what role these proteases play in virulence. Then, the lab will target key proteases with inhibitors, a class of drugs that has been highly successful as treatments for other diseases, but whose promise has yet to be applied to fungi. As the Homer lab grows, it will pursue larger-scale screens to discover other secreted fungal virulence factors in an effort to understand the unique biology of this important fungal pathogen and unlock avenues for novel antifungal therapeutics.