Irene Kasumba is a patent agent in the Washington, D.C., office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she is a member of the patents and innovations practice.

Most recently, Irene worked as a Research & Alliances Officer at the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB) as a member of the New Ventures team of the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT).  She has conducted research in a wide variety of vector-borne infectious diseases and enteric diseases. She has expertise in molecular biology, genetics, molecular microbiology, and parasitology, as well as genomics. Prior to joining UM Ventures, Irene was a Research Faculty in Dr. Sharon Tennant’s Laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health (CVD). During her time with CVD, she worked on the Vaccine Impact on Diarrhea in Africa (VIDA) project, studied the molecular epidemiology of Salmonella enterica spp. and Shigella spp., and advanced molecular diagnostic assays for Cryptosporidium spp. and Salmonella enterica spp. for CVD investigators and external collaborators.

Irene completed postdoctoral training under Dr. Patricia Rosa at the NIAID/NIH Rocky Mountain Laboratories, where she and colleagues identified molecular cues associated with Lyme disease bacteria infectivity in small mammals and developed widely applicable tools to manipulate and advance functional genetics studies of the bacteria.