Larissa is interested in designing de novo proteins that can modulate and stimulate powerful immune responses. By engineering immune responses, she wants to circumvent immunodeficiencies present in chronic diseases, improve vaccine efficacy, and tailor individual immune systems to be a ’natural therapeutic’. As an undergraduate, Larissa performed research in a variety of fields such as retroviral genetics, cancer cell biology, immunotherapy cure strategies for HIV chronic infection, and computational approaches for studying antibody development following vaccination. After obtaining her B.S. in Molecular Cell Biology from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, she completed a 2-year postbac at the NIH Vaccine Research Center, where she learned how to use yeast display to engineer improved antibodies against HIV for use in passive immunization. As a MolE PhD student, she plans to master protein engineering techniques in order to improve immune responses as well as expand her experience in biotechnology entrepreneurship in hopes of co-founding a start-up company dedicated to these pursuits. Larissa is a recipient of the Molecular Engineering & Sciences Institute Director’s Fellowship.