Stephen Bojanowski

Stephen grew up in Clarkston MI. In 2019, he enrolled as an undergraduate at Hope College in Holland, MI, where he earned a B.S. in Biology and a Minor in Chemistry. During his time there, he worked briefly in a lab under Dr. Joseph Stukey, who studied the genomic evolution of mycobacteriophage in the host M. smegmatis, including time in the Summer Hope Academic Research Program (SHARP) in 2021. After graduation in 2023, he spent 2 years pursuing an M.S. in Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, where he also worked as a Teacher's Assistant . His Master thesis was under the supervision of Dr. Anuj Kumar, whose lab focuses on the pseudohyphae phenotype of C. albicans in response to nitrogen starvation -an important pathogenicity phenotype- using S. cerevisiae as a model organism. His main focus was on KCS1, a kinase for inositol pyrophosphates (converting InsP6 to InsP7) which changes its activity when the enzyme is phosphorylated, affecting levels of InsP7 implicated in the pseudohyphal phenotype. In 2025, he was accepted into the BIOS PhD program at Notre Dame and after rotations in three infectious diseases labs, Stephen joined the Santiago-Tirado Lab, where he will be studying the role of Rab20 in macrophages that phagocytize the fungus C. neoformans. He also wants to focus on C. albicans in the context of catheter associated urinary infections (CAUTI) with the Flores-Mireles Lab (thus will be co-advised by Dr. Flores-Mireles). When not doing labwork he enjoys green tea, gardening, and fiction stories.