Rita McCall is a Microbiology PhD Candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Cox Lab at UC Berkeley. She received a B.A. in Biology with Honors from Grinnell College in Iowa. After graduating Rita completed a two year Postbaccalaureate Fellowship at the NIH where she studied the genetics of anthrax toxin production. For her thesis she is investigating novel aspects of the host response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection using reverse genetics and proximity based labeling approaches