April D. Davis

April Davis is the Director of the Rabies Laboratory at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center. She was an Emerging Infectious Disease Fellow from 1999-2001, splitting her time between the Wadsworth Center Rabies Laboratory and the CDC Rabies Laboratory. She attended Colorado State University as a student in the combined D.V.M, PhD program from which she graduated in 2007. After her postdoctoral program in the Wadsworth Center Arbovirology and Rabies Laboratories, she joined the Rabies Laboratory as the Deputy Director then as the Director in 2016.

April’s scientific interest include rabies pathogenesis, infectious diseases of bats, and developing and improving rabies diagnostic tools. Some current projects include validating a real-time RT- PCR assay for use as a confirmatory test to the dFAT, a real time RT-PCR assay capable of typing different rabies virus variants circulating the United States, and whole genome sequencing.