Mingli Zhao

Mingli Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She works under the guidance of Dr. Eric Schott and Dr. Colleen Burge at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. She is interested in discovering and charactering virus diversity in crustaceans. Her researches focus on identifying novel virus species and viral genotypes in blue crabs using NGS techniques. For her Ph.D. thesis, she studies the prevalence and genetic variation of a lethal pathogenic virus to blue crab -CsRV1, across a wide range of geographic locations from Massachusetts, USA to Uruguay, to investigate interactions between host life history and its viral pathogen.

Mingli earned her master’s degree in Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Back then, she worked on neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) of tongue sole and studied the functions of NETs to trap and kill bacteria. Outside research, she enjoys traveling, reading detective novels, and watching suspense-thrillers.