Sepideh was nominated for and awarded the Hypothesis Fund for the lab’s work in maternal immunology. Spearheaded by Remziye, we are investigating the impact of maternal stress on immunity at the fetal-maternal interface, which will improve our understanding of health disparities and infant mortality. Congratulations to Sepideh and Remziye!

Iylan is joining the Dolatshahi Lab for the summer of 2024 as part of the Systems Bioengineering Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) funded by the NSF. Welcome to the lab Iylan!

Mary received the Systems Biology and Data Sciences Training Grant, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Congrats Mary!

Dilara, a UVA undergraduate finishing her first year, joined the lab. She will be working remotely this summer before starting in-person in the fall. She is working with Shay on cancer-specific differences in glycosylation and golgi gene expression. Welcome Dilara!

Remziye received a Travel Award to attend and present at the American Society for Reproductive Immunology (ASRI) annual meeting in Houston, Texas!

Gabe and Remziye’s artwork received second place in the UVA Engineering is Beautiful Art Contest! Their submission entitled Double Vision: Lung Cancer by Eye and AI will be displayed at the Engineering School in Thornton Hall!

Remziye received the Philanthropic Educational Organization (PEO) Scholar Award! The PEO Scholar Award is a national, merit-based fellowship intended to recognize and encourage academic excellence and achievement by women in doctoral-level programs. Congratulations Remziye!

UVA BME undergraduate students nominated and voted Remziye as the Most Helpful Graduate Teaching Assistant for the 2023-2024 academic year. Well-earned, congrats Remziye!

A preprint from Shay’s collaboration with the Woodfolk lab was released on bioRxiv! The paper, “Distinct Type I Immune Networks Underlie the Severity of Restrictive Lung Disease after COVID-19”, investigates the immune landscape in the lungs of long COVID patients with distinct pulmonary function profiles. Special congrats to Shay!

Shay received an honorable mention for her application to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) - a prestigious award. Congratulations Shay!

Our lab’s highly collaborative preprint titled "Spatial analysis reveals combinative role for natural killer and CD8 T cells in antitumor immunity despite profound MHC I loss in NSCLC" with Brown and Bullock labs is out! We applied a systems immunology approach based on multicolor imaging of the NSCLC tumor microenvironment (spanning whole tumors, tumor sub-regions, and single-cell resolution) to investigate the presence of lymphocytes, their relationship to both tumor cells and other immune cells in the TME, and their activation status in MHC-I-disparate tumor regions. Our study highlights the importance of the dual presence of abundant intra-tumoral NK cells and CD8 T cells for long-term patient survival, and the need to devise and deploy NK-activating strategies which are likely to be key to developing highly efficacious next generation immunotherapies. Special congrats to Remziye and Kate!

We became a Gold Green Lab! Thanks to Gabe for leading the effort and to all lab members for their active involvement!

Our lab received the Cancer Systems Biology Consortium (CSBC) cross-consortium award for our project titled “Golgi stress and aberrant glycosylation in hypoxic conditions: regulation and immune interactions“, which is between the UVA U54 center and Dr. Kathryn Miller-Jensen from Yale. Shay Ladd collected the preliminary data and is spearheading these efforts.

Mary O'Sullivan is our new PhD student lab member, welcome Mary!

Mary is the recipient of the UVA Engineering School Distinguished Fellowship.

Remziye wins best Podium Talk award at the 2023 Commonwealth of Virginia Cancer Research Conference (CVCRC). Well-deserved, Remziye!

Dolatshahi lab members had a strong presence at the 2023 Commonwealth of Virginia Cancer Research Conference in Charlottesville. Shay, Kate, and Remziye gave talks and Rob and Gabe presented posters on their research. Congratulations to all!

We celebrated Christmas at Shay’s. We forgot to take a picture when everyone was there!

Unveiling the Dynamics of Maternal Immune Responses. Read more here: https://engineering.virginia.edu/news-events/news/unveiling-dynamics-maternal-immune-responses

We went out to celebrate the many awards, papers and successes of our lab as well as our rotation students this semester.

Dr. Dolatshahi was invited to present our lab’s work in the Barrier Immunology symposium at NIH at Session 7: Systems Immunology at the barrier.

Remziye's hard work paid off, her first paper was published at Plos Computational Biology, congratulations Remziye!

Gabe Hanson, PhD student in our lab presented an engaging poster at BMES2023 as evidenced by the audience!

BME undergraduate students selected Dr. Dolatshahi as the most inclusive professor of the year, which was awarded at the BME formal. Such an honor, thank you!

Two lab members are proud awardees of the Systems Biology and Data Science (SBDS) training grant. Congratulations Gabe and Shay!

Our lab received funding from the Jeffress Trust to uncover immune inflammatory axes of racial disparities linked with gestational weight gain in pregnant women. Thank you for supporting our research!

Rob and Remziye presented their work at AAI 2023, see them in action!

Dr. Dolatshahi is the 2023 Chambers-Thermo Fisher Scientific Award Recipient. She was especially honored and inspired to receive this award when she learned more about what a great mentor Dr. Chambers was!

Dr. Dolatshahi also gave a talk on behalf of their collaborative team at UVA titled “Systems approaches to characterize the local heterogeneities in NK cell antitumor immunity in MHC I-disparate human non-small cell lung cancer“.

Dr. Dolatshahi was immensely honored to be selected by the UVA BME undergraduate students as the most Inclusive Professor of the year!

Dr. Dolatshahi presents Dolatshahi lab work to an engaged UCLA BME audience.

After rotating in the Dolatshahi lab in Fall 2022, two awsome lab members join the lab as PhD students. Welcome!

Esha presented the results of her summer research at the UVA Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium. She collaborated with her Ph.D. mentor, Remziye, and used data-driven approaches to identify key glycosylation genes that control post-translational modification of cell proteins through a process called glycosylation. The work will lead to a better understanding of what role glycosylation plays in vaginal infections that can lead to preterm birth. “My research can inform potential therapies for preventing preterm births.”

From left to right: Remziye, Rob, Esha, Anne, Lavie, Sepideh

Congratulations to Rob and we are grateful to the UVA Cancer Center for this grant that allows Rob to devise methods to utilize macrophages and the glycosylation program as a new immunotherapeutic approach.

Remziye passed her qualifying exam and is officially a Ph.D. candidate as of today, congratulations!

Anne represented the Dolatshahi lab at the Southern Immunology conference and presented her work on network inference approaches in the tumor microenvironment!.

Remziye was appointed to the Systems & Biomolecular Data Science (SBDS) Training Grant in a competitive selection process at UVA. Congratulations, Remziye!

Remziye represented the Dolatshahi lab and presented her work on a computational model that elucidated the mechanisms of selective transfer of IgG antibodies at the American Society of Reproductive Immunology (ASRI 2022) meeting. Her poster received an honorable mention award- given to the top 6 posters. https://theasri.org/Poster-Awards

Rob passed his qualifying exam and is officially a Ph.D. candidate as of today, way to go!

Rob represented the Dolatshahi lab and presented his work focused on the role of ST6GAL1 in M2 macrophage anti-inflammatory functions at AAI 2022 in Portland, Oregon.

Our lab hosted a Master of Data Science (MSDS) team, who has been working with us under the supervision of Dr. Talkington since Fall 2021. During their two semesters in our lab, in collaboration with Dr. Shakeri’s lab from the UVA School of Data Science, they developed a pipeline to process raw single cell RNA-sequencing datasets, which offers multiple user-defined choices for cell-type identification. Today, they presented their work at the 2022 IEEE symposium! Picture (from left to right): Edwin Purcell , Cecily Wolfe, David Chen, Celine (Yayi) Feng.

March 27 2022, From left to right: Dr. Dolatshahi, Shri, Anne, Remziye, Rob

Congratulations to Kate Goundry, 2nd year undergraduate researcher in the Dolatshahi lab for being accepted to the UMD Medical Center translational cancer research program (the NSIP) for summer 2022. She had multiple offers! :)

Congratulations to the Dolatshahi Lab third year undergraduate researcher Esha Tulsian for receiving the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship for the summer of 2022!

Remziye presents her research titled “Systems Analysis of Maternal-fetal Omics Data Reveals Racial Differences in Pregnancy Immune Adaptation," at the University of Virginia School of Medicine Health Disparities Conference, Feb 2022.

Dr. Talkington receives the UVA NIH T32 Immunology Training Grant as a postdoctoral fellow! She is excited to join the amazing UVA ITG community and do creative and impactful systems immunology work!

Remziye presents her results on “A Data-Driven and Mechanistic Modeling Investigation of IgG Transplacental Transfer Suggests a Key Role for FcgRIIb-mediated Transfer by Endothelial Cells," at the Maternal-Fetal Newborn Immunity Keystone Symposia, Oct 2021 (virtual).

Our lab had a strong presence in BMES 2021 Oct 6-10. Remziye presented a poster on her work “A Mechanistic Model of Transplacental Immunoglobulin G Transfer During Pregnancy”. Rob had an oral presentation on our collaborative work with Dr. Larry Lum’s lab titled “A Mechanistic Model of Bispecific Antibody Activated T-cell Therapy Predicts Breast Cancer Tumor Reduction in-silico,”. Last but not least our talented REU student Abigail Cordiner from North Carolina State University presented her poster on a collaborative work with Dr. Peirce-Cottler’s lab titled “New Insights into IgG1 Transport Across Placenta Using Agent-Based Modeling.” Abigail worked closely with her PhD student mentor, Remziye Erdogan on her work.

[Representative photo: Abigail Cordiner and Dr. Peirce-Cottler at undergraduate poster session BMES 2021.]

The Dolatshahi and Naegle labs join forces at the annual UVA BME Tug of War competition! We were the post-translationals from MR4: glycosylation (Dolatshahi Lab) and phosphorylation (Naegle Lab)!

The Dolatshahi lab is working in collaboration with the Brown and Bullock labs to develop systems approaches to understand and harness immune-TME spatial interactions in Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)

Dr. Talkington received her Ph.D. in Computational Biology and a master’s in Applied Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her undergraduate degree from Duke University double-majoring in Biology and Mathematics.

Dolatshahi lab was awarded a one-year research grant from the Jeffress Trust, which will allow us to begin uncovering the key maternal and placental immune regulatory mechanisms differentially affecting antibody transfer during pregnancy across racial groups in Virginia. This marks our lab’s first external funding. Read news here.

We will be dissecting the origins of heterogeneous cancer cellular interactions and responses to therapeutic perturbation.

After rotating in the Dolatshahi Lab in Fall 2020, we are excited to welcome Rob and Remziye to our lab!

This funding will allow us to embark on the characterization of the design space of monoclonal antibody glycosylation in innate immune-mediated cancer therapeutics.

Sepideh starts her new lab at the Medical Research Building 4 (MR4) at the Biomedical Engineering department at the medical campus at UVA! (Empty lab depicted)