Carmen Gerlach, PhD

Research Interests:

The goal of our research is to unravel basic principles and mechanisms underlying the generation, maintenance, and consequences of the diversity within CD8+ T cell responses. We aim to provide basic insights into T cell differentiation and T cell responses in general to improve vaccines and immunotherapies. In our projects we address the following topics:

• Universal patterns of T cell differentiation across species
• Clonal aspects of CD8 T cell responses
• Molecular mechanisms underlying the heterogeneity within T cell responses
• Exploiting T cell heterogeneity for cancer immunotherapy

Our laboratory employs methodologies such as cellular barcoding for lineage tracing, multi-color flow-cytometry, single-cell RNA sequencing and other sequencing approaches, tracking of antigen-specific responses to infection, vaccination and experimental tumors.