Dr Ballou is a group leader and Wellcome Trust funded Fellow at the University of Exeter. She is broadly interested in fungal mechanisms of pathogenesis, including how dynamic fungal morphologies impact patient outcomes.
Dr Ballou earned a PhD in Genetics and Genomics at Duke University in the United States before moving to the United Kingdom to join the laboratory of Professor Alistair Brown at the University of Aberdeen. In 2015, Dr Ballou was awarded an Anniversary Future Leader Fellowship from the BBSRC. In 2017, she moved to the University of Birmingham, and in 2018 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Henry Dale Fellowship and Beit Prize to study Cryptococcus neoformans, which is ubiquitious in the environment and causes deadly meningitis in patients with immune deficiencies.
Dr Ballou joined the University of Exeter and the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology in 2021. She was awarded a Lister Prize in 2022 to study Mucoralean fungal pathogenesis. Her lab now studies the molecular mechanisms of fungal pathogenesis in a broad range of organisms spanning basidiomycete and mucoralean fungi, with a focus on how host-relevant stimuli, including immune-derived and bacterial-derived signals, influence fungal morphologies underpinning disease.