The Sil Lab

Welcome to the Sil Lab, a basic research laboratory in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco.

We study the thermally dimorphic pathogenic fungi Histoplasma and Coccidioides, the causitive agents of Histoplasmosis and Valley Fever. We are interested in the molecular mechanisms of both virulence and immune evasion in mammalian hosts as well as temperature sensing and developmental regulation of the dimorphic transition between the saphrophytic hyphal and pathogenic yeast or spherule morphologies.