Felipe Santiago Tirado

Felipe was born and raised in the beautiful Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico, where he received a B.S. in Industrial Biotechnology from the Mayagüez campus of the University of Puerto Rico. During that time he had great research experiences, including an internship at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Lab and did agricultural research at the Experimental Farm Station of the University. After those experiences, he decided to attend grad school at Cornell University, where he studied cell polarization in the lab of Anthony Bretscher. Felipe’s work earned numerous awards, including an NIH NRSA predoctoral fellowship. He obtained the Ph.D. in August 2011 and spent the next several years as a postdoc and a staff scientist in the lab of Tamara Doering at Washington University School of Medicine. During this time, as an awardee of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Felipe worked to understand the fungal interactions of the environmental yeast Cryptococcus with host phagocytes as well as elucidate how this fungus is able to penetrate the blood-brain barrier. He was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 2018, opening his lab early in 2019 where he studies “the cell biology of cryptococcal disease.”