Margarita
Dominguez-Villar, PhD

Research Interests:

Our laboratory is interested in understanding the mechanisms that control human CD4⁺ T cell responses and regulatory T cell function in homeostasis, and how these mechanisms are impaired in autoimmune diseases and chronic viral infections. We are currently working on the following research topics:

• The role of TNF signaling in the maintenance of regulatory T cell identity in health and disease
• The immune-metabolic mechanisms that underlie the natural protection to T1D associated to specific HLA haplotypes
• The mechanisms of T cell dysfunction in HTLV-1-induced myelopathy

We use novel approaches to analyze antigen-specific T cells ex vivo and in vitro from tissue and blood samples from healthy individuals and people with disease, CRISPR/Cas9 technologies for gene editing and a variety of other assays to interrogate the function of T cells.