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 send me an email with the following:
Undergraduates: Please let me know your major, year, and why you are interested in the group!
Graduate students:
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!
Graduate students who are 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, you will 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. We also do not take direct admit students.
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