Joint Doctoral Program scholar Hannah Battey named Merkin Graduate Fellow

Hannah Battey, a Joint Doctoral Program (JDP) scholar at San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego, was recently named a Merkin Graduate Fellow by UCSD. The fellowship gives her and other graduate students the opportunity to travel abroad for international research opportunities.

The fellowship helped Battey spend three months in Sri Lanka touring clinical recruitment sites and training the clinical and laboratory teams for her current project.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have had this opportunity to gain hands-on experience in global research and to take on a deeper level of involvement in my current project,” Battey said.

Battey’s project involves identifying bacterial pneumonia disease targets and evaluating how well these targets are conserved across the general population. Colombo, Sri Lanka is one of the key study sites for the project and where she and her team at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology plan to recruit a portion of their patients.

“The experience also gave me a much better understanding of the logistical challenges specific to that setting and allowed me to establish strong working relationships with both the clinical and laboratory teams,” she said. “Those relationships and insights will be invaluable as recruitment begins.”

Although she is in the epidemiology track of the JDP, Battey earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology. With this current project, she is able to draw from her biology training while applying an epidemiological lens — a unique pairing of perspectives when addressing research problems.

“What makes this project especially exciting to me is that it allows me to combine my laboratory background with multi-country patient recruitment, bioinformatic analysis, and epidemiologic thinking,” she said. “It has given me the opportunity to approach these research questions from multiple angles.”

Battey became interested in public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she served as an infection preventionist. In that role, she saw the importance of practical application for scientific findings firsthand, which eventually motivated her to pursue a Ph.D. in public health.

Once she completes her Ph.D., she plans to focus on infectious disease work, in particular, diagnostics, antimicrobial resistance, and vaccine development. She’s also keeping the door open to conduct this work internationally.

“Receiving the Merkin Graduate Fellowship meant having the opportunity to do the kind of work I hope to pursue after completing my Ph.D.: contributing to global public health research projects,” she said.

Even after receiving the fellowship, Battey feels she still has more to accomplish during her doctoral studies. Regarding her experience in Sri Lanka, Battey is happy to share more with any students who may be interested in the fellowship.