Thanks for your interest in the lab! We are located in Hill Pavilion, on Penn’s main campus in Philadelphia. If you are interested in joining the lab, please follow the instructions below, depending on your career stage:

Undergraduates: Please let me know your major, year, and why you are interested in the group!

Graduate students who are considering applying/applying to Penn:
In recent years, I’ve gotten more emails requesting confirmation over a year in advance about whether we will be taking rotation students in the next academic year. This is generally difficult to impossible to predict because it depends on funding, lab capacity, and who ends up joining and leaving the lab in the next year. For these reasons, if you contact me asking whether I will be taking rotation students 6-12 months before that rotation would start, I will assume that you have not read our lab page, and you will either get no response, or get an email that says something along the lines of the following: “Thank you for your interest in the lab. While we generally anticipate accepting rotators, this will depend on lab capacity and funding, so I cannot guarantee whether we will take any in X academic year. I would encourage you to apply to Penn and reach out to me if you are invited to interview.” We do not provide letters of support specifying that I support your application or that I will be taking rotation students, unless I know you well enough to be writing you a letter of recommendation. Because we get many more emails expressing interest that I have time to address, I also as a rule to not chat with prospective students 1:1 before they have applied to Penn and have been invited to interview. If you are interested, take a look at our recent publications, as those will give you the best idea of what we are currently interested in. We also do not take direct admit students.

Graduate students who are at Penn:
We take graduate students through the established graduate programs at the University of Pennsylvania, and we are affiliated with the Microbiology, Virology, and Parasitology Program, the Genomics and Computational Biology Program, and the Biology Graduate Program. If you are interested in the lab, I encourage you to apply to one of the Penn graduate programs, and contact me about doing a rotation after you’ve been invited to interview. If you do so, I will make sure that we can find a time to talk during or after the interview.

If you’ve been accepted into a different, related, graduate program at U Penn and would like to chat about rotating, feel free to reach out. In your email, please tell me which graduate program you are in, a bit about your background, and when you are hoping to rotate. Please attach a CV or resume, and let me know why you’re interested in the lab!

Post-docs: Tell me a bit about what your PhD work was about, what it showed/contributed to the field, and why you are interested in the lab. Please also include a CV and names of 3 references, as well as your approximate timeline for finishing your PhD/starting in the group.

Email:
lhmoncla@upenn.edu

Mail:
Louise Moncla
H318 Hill Pavilion
380 South University Ave.
Philadelphia, PA, 19104