September 30, 2025
Please join us in c
ongratulating Rebecca Elsner, PhD, for her new role as Assistant Professor in the University of Pittsburgh Department of Immunology, effective July 1, 2025.
Dr. Elsner will develop a research program that focuses on understanding how B cells are directed towards either germinal center responses or the lesser studied extrafollicular (EF) response. Using models of infection that shut down the EF response, Dr. Elsner will investigate the cellular interactions and regulation of this response type and develop new tools to study it in mice and humans. Her lab seeks to understand the role of the EF response in fighting infection and how its dysregulation is involved in autoimmune disorders, such as lupus, with the goal of identifying novel therapeutic approaches and vaccine design strategies.
Motivated by a long-standing interest in how pathogens evade the immune system, Dr. Elsner earned her PhD in Microbiology at the University of California, Davis in the lab of Dr. Nicole Baumgarth. Her research focused on how Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease, fails to induce long-lived immunity in hosts by shutting down the germinal center response. She joined Dr. Mark Shlomchik’s lab at Pitt in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow before being appointed as a Staff Research Scientist in 2020 and Research Assistant Professor in 2022. Her research in Dr. Shlomchik’s lab led to the important discovery that IL-12 is a key regulator of B cell fates, coordinating adaptive immunity toward effector T and B cell production through the EF response and inhibiting GC formation.
Dr. Elsner has published more than 15 peer-reviewed articles and presented her work in posters and presentations at numerous conferences across the country. She was recently awarded R21 and R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health to study B cell activation and the EF response, and a Lupus Innovation Award from the Lupus Research Alliance to study EF response regulation in autoimmune disease