Mission
The Center for Systems Immunology (CSI) at the University of Pittsburgh is focused on nucleating and nurturing research and training at the interface of Immunology, Computational Biology, and Biological Engineering. This is accomplished through a dual mission of (i) catalyzing and facilitating inter-disciplinary research initiatives that build a systems-level understanding of immune system development and function and/or pathogen responses and immune-mediated diseases and (ii) harnessing systems-level understanding to rationally enhance vaccine responses and/or to design new therapeutic modalities for immune disorders.
Background
Research advances continue to reveal the ever-widening impact of the immune system on human health and disease. Given its experimental tractability, the immune system is wonderfully suited for approaches drawn from Systems and Synthetic Biology. This is further enabled by advances in technologies that enable deep molecular and spatial-temporal profiling of cellular immune responses and the engineering of transplantable immune cells.
CSI Faculty and Activities
The founding Director of the Center is Dr. Harinder Singh, Professor in the Department of Immunology and Computational and Systems Biology. Core as well as affiliated faculty are drawn from diverse Departments within the University of Pittsburgh including Immunology, Computational and Systems Biology, Biomedical Informatics, Microbiology, Medicine, Surgery, Cell Biology, and Chemistry. Three new faculty have been recruited – Alok Joglekar (Caltech), Jishnu Das (MIT), and Jason Lohmueller (U Pitt). The Center hosts a monthly research forum featuring presentations of ongoing research by faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. An annual one-day retreat brings together a large inter-disciplinary community of 150-200 participants including colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University. For more information, please contact Harinder Singh, PhD
Participating Faculty and Labs
Harinder Singh, Ph.D.
Analysis of transcription factors and gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that orchestrate the development and functioning of innate as well as adaptive cells of the immune system
Jishnu Das, Ph.D.
Statistical and machine-learning techniques to integrate multi-omic datasets (genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and antibody-omic) and elucidate molecular mechanisms of immune regulation and dysregulation
Alok Joglekar, Ph.D.
T cell antigen discovery technologies, understanding the targets of T cell responses, immunotherapy using engineered cells, systems, and synthetic immunology
Jason Lohmueller, Ph.D.
Synthetic biology, cancer immunotherapy, adoptive T Cell therapy, CAR T Cells Gene Therapy