Dr. Vojtech’s lab studies immunity in the female genital tract and during pregnancy. One primary focus is investigating how factors in semen, especially extracellular vesicles, impact immunity. How semen influences immunity has wide-ranging implications for outcomes including infertility and conception, susceptibility to sexually transmitted infections, and the success of vaccine-mediated immune protection against STIs. Another focus is on how immune responses to STIs develop following primary infection in the female genital tract. Ongoing projects include understanding what constitutes a protective immune response against Chlamydia trachomatis, studying how semen mediates immunity to paternal antigens pre-conception, harnessing circulating extracellular vesicles from blood during pregnancy as a snapshot of pregnancy health, and in investigating how use of opioid drugs leads to epigenetic changes in germ cells which may persist into future generations.