Immune System: At the Core

Imagine using a tiny tissue sample from a patient to grow a functional "mini-organ" in a petri dish! It sounds like science fiction, but this is exactly what we do in our lab! Complete with their own immune defenses, these mini-organs allow us to observe how our body could react to world stimuli in real-time. We can study how viruses interact with our cells, how conditions like Crohn’s and colitis develop, or how drugs affect us at a cellular level. By recreating these complex environments, we can identify specific disease triggers and find new ways to intervene.

Remember mono? Most of us catch it young and move on. But the virus behind it, Epstein-Barr, never leaves. Even if you dodged mono, over 95% of us carry it. It hides in your immune cells for life, and growing evidence links it to multiple sclerosis, lupus, and other chronic diseases where your body turns on itself. How does one virus cause so many different diseases? Come find out!

What if your doctor could test a drug on your brain before you ever took a single pill? We can't peek inside a living brain to see how it develops or reacts to disease, so we’re doing the next best thing: growing them in the lab. By turning a few skin cells into "mini-brains" (organoids), we can recreate a patient’s unique biology in a dish. Join me to discover how these tiny models are helping us decode complex neurological disorders and why the future of medicine isn't just personal, it’s grown in a lab.

The first breath a newborn takes is the most difficult breath they will ever take in their lifetime. While babies born at full term are ready for this challenge, for the millions of infants born premature, that first breath, and every breath, thereafter, becomes exponentially harder. The villain – their own immune system. But why do premature babies battle death due to processes that cause a cold in adults? My research aims to answer this by studying immune cells in the developing lung with the hope that it helps make that most difficult breath, that very first one, just a little bit easier.