Nicole Joller, PhD

Research Interests:

Our understanding of host-pathogen interaction is primarily derived from studying how the immune system protects us from a single pathogen. In contrast, it is largely unknown how this response alters the body’s ability to respond to a second infectious agent or the susceptibility to autoimmunity or cancer. Our goal is to investigate the long-term effects of pathogenic challenges on future responses. Currently, we are focusing on changes in the regulatory compartment of the adaptive immune system.
Specifically we aim to:

• Analyze how regulatory T cell (Treg) function and the composition of the Treg compartment are affected by different types of infections
• Determine how alterations in the Treg compartment affect susceptibility to infections and autoimmunity
• Investigate how previous infections affect the susceptibility to an unrelated secondary challenge
• Investigate how co-inhibitory receptors affect immune control of pathogens

To achieve this goal we use a wide variety of techniques including: transcriptomics, high dimensional flow cytometry, in vitro and in vivo immunological assays, animal models (infectious and autoimmune).