Lauren Panny: Fighting the invisible enemy

This photo shows a young white woman with long dark brown hair wearing an orange short-sleeved top and smiling at the camera. She is seated at a black lab bench and a microscope and other lab equipment is visible in the background. — Lauren Panny, a graduate student in the Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences Program at Virginia Tech, studies mosquito-spread viruses. Photo courtesy of Lauren Panny.

The following story was written in November 2021 by Emma Chan in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.

Virus researcher Lauren Panny started college as an art major, but her work now is driven by the idea that something as tiny as a virus—something that is not even alive—can have a very profound impact on both humans and animals. Her goal? To protect people against potential bio-warfare and bioterrorism.

Panny studies medicines that can target the essential interactions between viruses and human cells and decrease the amounts of virus that can infect cells. While this a bit different from studying art, she couldn’t picture herself anywhere else.

When Panny started her undergraduate degree at Louisiana State University, she quicky figured out that art was more of a hobby for her than a vocation. So Panny turned to her second love, the sciences. As a little girl, Panny spent her days collecting frogs and salamanders. A New York native, she loved going to the American Museum of Natural History to learn about dinosaurs. While her first inclination was to study paleontology, she ended up going with something more practical: general biology (with a minor in fine arts). While studying as an undergraduate, Panny spent some time studying genetics, which she enjoyed, but not as much as her colleagues did. She wanted to discover a field of study that she could sleep, eat, and breathe. She wanted to find her passion.

After graduation, she spent two years in the workforce searching before finding her passion between the pages of a book. The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story is about the dangers of viral hemorrhagic fevers. Written by Richard Preston, the book recounts the discovery at a monkey quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia, of an Ebola virus that infects only monkeys. Panny decided that she wanted to dedicate her life to protecting people against potential bio-warfare and bioterrorism.

This photo shows a white person with long dark hair in a ponytail wearing a white lab coat and blue medical gloves and peering into microscope eyepieces at a lab bench. — Panny's virus research requires extensive work with a microscope. Photo courtesy of Lauren Panny.

After searching through programs that had Bio-Safety Level 3 labs (federally classified labs that require the containment of airborne bacteria, viruses, and toxins), Panny found a home at George Mason University and a mentor in Dr. Kylene Kehn-Hall. So important was their academic connection that when Kehn-Hall left GMU two years later for Virginia Tech’s Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, so did Panny.

Like GMU, Virginia Tech is home to a Bio-Safety Level-3 lab. While Panny and her fellow grad students do not work on a team in a traditional sense, they do tend to help each other out whenever possible. This has created an atmosphere of growth, along with the opportunity to learn new techniques and work with various state-of-the-art technologies.

Panny’s current research focuses on mosquito-spread viruses such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and eastern equine encephalitis virus, and she hopes that her research will help slow the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses. She has also worked with the COVID-19 virus. One of the complications of working with these viruses is that sometimes Panny needs to see how the virus is replicating at different timepoints, meaning that she often finds herself coming into the lab late at night. As a grad student, Panny must also time her experiments around her classes, but because of the unpredictable nature of the viruses, those experiments occasionally run later than expected.

A generalized research frustration that Panny has faced is coming up with the hypothesis for an experiment, feeling like it’s a brilliant idea, completing the experiment, and discovering that she has to reject the hypothesis. To deal with these frustrations, Panny takes a step back, takes a deep breath, and then learns from that experiment before moving on.

Over the years, Panny has been inspired by a plethora of experts in her field. Among her favorites is Dr. Nancy Jaax, whose role in the book The Hot Zone helped inspire Panny’s work. Jaax served as a veterinarian with the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and helped prevent a potential outbreak of Ebola in the Washington, D.C., area. Another of her inspirations is Walter Reed, an army physician that led the team that confirmed a theory that yellow fever was transmitted by a particular mosquito species rather than through direct contact. Her other heroes include Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, who despite limited funding discovered the vaccine for whooping cough, a once-common disease that killed many children.

It’s been a long time since Panny was an undergraduate in Louisiana studying art, and while it took her a while to find her passion, there is no doubting the fact that she has found it now. She loves her research and hopes that it will someday help soldiers and other potential victims of bioterrorism.