Congratulations to Alicia Montemayor on successfully defending her M.S. thesis titled “INSECT-VECTORED ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE IN TEXAS LIVESTOCK ENVIRONMENTS: A METAGENOMIC ANALYSIS”
Alicia Montemayor successfully defended her master’s thesis in May 2026. Her work was based on assembling the pathobiome of insects, especially blowflies, collected across different livestock contexts in the state of Texas. Her thesis project used blowfly sampling from different categories of livestock farming intensity in Texas: low, medium, and high, in particular, and also assessed the presence or absence of cattle as an explanatory variable. She applied various sequencing and metagenomics approaches, followed by computational analysis, to determine the patterns of geographical distribution of different pathogens of human and livestock interest. Alicia did an outstanding job assembling her thesis, and her defense was well attended and received.
Congratulations, Alicia, and we wish you the very best for your next steps.