Katia Troha was a NOMIS–Salk Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, US).

Troha received a BA in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in immunology and infectious disease from Cornell University. During her PhD, she was awarded a Biological and Biomedical Sciences Fellowship and Diversity Fellowship from Cornell University and as a postdoctoral fellow, she was awarded the Eddie Méndez Scholar Award. Troha’s research approaches the study of infection in way that’s unique from the traditional perspective, which focuses on mechanisms of pathogen killing. Instead, Troha seeks to characterize the cooperative defense system: mechanisms that, independent of pathogen killing, promote health and survival by preventing and/or alleviating physiological damage during infection. During her PhD studies, Troha led projects that identified core components of the cooperative defense system and characterized the contribution of non-immune organs to the defense response against infection.

As a NOMIS–Salk Fellow, Troha worked to elucidate the contribution of physiological renal adaptations to the cooperative defense system. Specifically, she focuses on how metabolic adaptations in the kidney can promote health and survival during sepsis. Her research has clinical implications in that it may provide new physiologies to target during infections.