On December 17th, 2025, Dr. Matthew Ryan Kulpa became the first graduate student from the Verocai Lab to receive a PhD degree! A huge accomplishment for Matt, Dr. Verocai, and the lab itself.
Matt defended his thesis titled “Exploring filarial nematode biodiversity of wild North American ungulates through novel molecular approaches for diagnosis” on October 14th. His work greatly expanded our understanding on the biodiversity of species of the genus Onchocerca infecting wild North American ungulates, their geographic, vector and mammal host associations. In addition, Matt validated a novel molecular tool for screening host and vector samples for co-infections by filarioid nematodes using Oxford Nanopore next generation sequencing, and bioinformatic analysis.
During his doctoral degree Matt was supported by two prestigious scholarships – the VMBS Merit Fellowship and the TAMU Dissertation Fellowship. He also got multiple awards, including the TAMU CVMBS Outstanding Graduate Student Award, VMBS Graduate Student Research Trainee Grant, as well as various travel awards. Matt attended 5 annual meetings of the American Association of Veterinary Parasitologists (AAVP), one meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists (ASP), a virtual meeting of the World Association for the Advancement of Veterinary Parasitology, and the Parasitology Summer Course (ParSCo) in southern Italy.
Matt has published nine peer reviewed papers, three of these as first author. In addition, three first-author manuscripts have been submitted for publication! In addition, Matt was the founder and president of the TAMU student chapter of the AAVP, and sole admin of this very website for a while!
Matt has now secured a postdoctoral research associate position at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he will continue to work on filarial nematodes from a global health perspective (The DOLF Project), including Onchocerca volvulus, the causative agent of “river blindness” in humans. We are very excited and look forward to his growth as a scientist!
Best of luck, Matt!
