Welcome to the Kaur lab! Our research primarily focuses on congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV), which is the leading infectious cause of birth defects worldwide. cCMV impacts approximately 1 in 200 infants in the US alone, making the disease more prominent than down syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome. A major barrier to the development of vaccines for cCMV has been the lack of understanding of the maternal correlates of protection against infection. For this reason, one of the goals of our research is to understand the immunologic determinants of cCMV transmission and disease. Another goal of our studies is to better understand how CMV impacts the maternal and fetal immune system. Like other herpesviruses, CMV is able to modulate the host immune system- notably the T cell and NK cell compartments. We are interested in revealing the impact of CMV infection on the maternal and fetal immune system, in addition to the immune populations at the maternal-fetal interface. Finally, we are also studying natural killer T (NKT) cells, a type of innate T lymphocyte population that can modulate different arms of the immune system and be harnessed as an adjuvant to potentiate vaccine efficacy.