Immunology Training Grant awardee: Dr. Anne Talkington’s research was focused on studying the mechanisms of interaction between tumor and immune cells, with the goal of understanding how these interactions correspond to treatment resistance in cancer.  She used a combination of mathematical modeling and data-based methods to associate tumor-immune interaction networks with the characteristics of a patient's tumor.  She aimed to understand interactions in the tumor microenvironment that could be better targeted to improve responsiveness to therapy, and thus, patient outcome. She is currently a Mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and will go on to start her faculty position after that.

Liz was focused on research at the fetal-maternal interface. Her capstone project in our lab was on optimizing a transwell assay to study transplacental antibody transfer.

Esha joine our lab as a third-year undergraduate student, majoring in Biomedical Engineering and minoring in Computer Science. She employed data-driven approaches to integrate data from high-throughput antibody and cytokine profiling assays performed on longitudinal human cohorts. She was a recipient of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the Dean’s office during summer 2022. Apart from research, she loves learning about different cultures and cooking/trying new recipes!

Sam used computational methods to investigate changes in glycosylation that occur during cancer. He was especially interested in how these changes relate to cell signaling. In his free time, he likes to teach, play strategy games, and pace around at the mall. Sam was a lab member from starting during high school through his early years as an undergraduate student at UVA before going to study abroad in Japan!

Shri’s research was aimed at optimizing assays for the genetic engineering of cell lines to modulate their glycosylation pattern. Outside of school/research, she loves reading, Taylor Swift, and woodworking! Currently, she is a PhD student at the Biomedical Engineering department at Johns Hopkins.

Valeria’s research under the supervision of Rob Barnes in the Dolatshahi lab was focused on the analysis of CITE-seq data to uncover the interaction between bispecific antibody armed T cells and tumor cells. Outside of school/research, she enjoys playing soccer, volunteering as an EMT, and playing the saxophone in the marching band.

Lavie, a VCU graduate, joined the Dolatshahi lab as part of the UVA Summer REU in Multi-Scale Systems Bioengineering and Biomedical Data Sciences program. She presented her work titled “miRNA Regulation of Glycosylation Genes in Cancer Cell Lines“ at the UVA BME 4S seminar series as well as a poster at the BMES conference in October of 2022. Lavie is now pursuing her PhD in Biomedical Engineering here at UVA, starting in August of 2023.

Danna ‘s research was focused on the protocol optimization for maternal blood sample collection, as part of our neonatal-maternal immunity project. Sarah was part-time researching in our lab from March -June 2022. She joined a master’s in Biomedical Engineering program at UCSD in Fall 2022.

Joshua was a medical student at the UVA School of Medicine. He worked on a review paper focused on the computational methods to infer and model inter-cellular interactions in the tumor microenvironment. He is currently doing his residency at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Sarah joined our lab in the summer of 2020 and focused on neonatal-maternal immunity research. She is now a Product Development Engineer at restor3d.

Aubrey joined the Dolatshahi lab in summer 2020. She studied the perturbation of glycosylation genes in non-small cell lung carcinoma in TCGA gene expression data.

Sarah’s research was focused on developing a kinetic-dynamic model of the bispecific antibody therapeutics. Sarah started her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2021.

Medhini’s research was focused on using unsupervised computational methods to study the perturbation of glycosylation genes in skin cancers using TCGA data.

Abigail was an NSF REU from North Carolina State University, co-mentored by the Pierce-Cottler lab. Under the supervision of her Ph.D. mentor, Remziye, she developed an agent-based model (ABM) of the transplacental transfer of antibodies in the Dolatshahi lab. She presented her poster titled “New Insights into IgG1 Transport Across Placenta Using Agent-Based Modeling” at BMES 2021.