Abby grew up in rural New Hampshire surrounded with nature and mountains and has chased that landscape all the way to Seattle. Growing up, it was through her fossil finding expeditions with her paleontologist dad that she fell in love with evolutionary biology. In middle school, she read one of many books that would change her life, The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, which started her obsession with infectious disease and viruses. This was further nurtured by her high school biology teacher Mr. Chisholm and his African burrowing tortoise Slowpoke, who enjoyed munching on lettuce under her lab bench.
She followed that passion for viruses to the big city of Philadelphia, where she majored in biology at University of Pennsylvania. Abby worked in the joint lab of Kelly Jordan-Sciutto and Judy Grinspan at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania and Penn for four years during college studying HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders. This was where she learned to love research, marveled at the extreme rate of evolution in HIV, and decided that she didn’t really love mouse work.
In search of mountains and more HIV research, she moved across the country to take a job in Lillie Cohn’s lab at Fred Hutch (with a couple of detours working at a sheep farm in England and her old summer camp in Maine). She worked for two years in the Cohn lab studying how HIV evolves resistance to broadly neutralizing antibody treatments. It was here that she realized the power of learning from and collaborating with people living with HIV and decided to pursue a joint MD-PhD degree. After deciding to stay in Seattle and join University of Washington’s MD-PhD program, she joined the Malik lab in Spring 2026.
Abby’s project focuses on screening for viral derived anti-viral peptides that work through dominant-negative inhibition. She is a member of the UW MSTP program and the MCB Graduate Program. Outside the lab she loves to hike, xc ski, bike, play soccer, garden, and generally do anything in the fresh air. If forced to stay inside, you can find her reading, knitting, or trying to perfect a gluten free baked good recipe.