The Immunobiology Seminar Series presents: "System Immunology to Study Human Immune Aging and Impaired Vaccine Responses"
Presenter Details
Duygu Ucar, PhD
Professor
The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine
Dr. Ucar is a scientist with interdisciplinary training in (epi)genomics, biology of aging, systems immunology, and computational biology. The overarching goal of the Ucar lab is to investigate the donor-level heterogeneity in immune system aging and to learn from this heterogeneity to arrive at more precise vaccination strategies for older adults (i.e., precision gerontology and precision vaccinology). They investigate how aging disrupts the transcriptional programs of human immune cells and how age-related immunogenomic changes affect vaccine responsiveness by following a Systems Immunology approach where we combine functional/cellular immunology with cutting-edge single cell genomics and computational biology techniques. So far, my lab uncovered epigenomic and transcriptomic signatures of aging in human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), discovered sex differences in these signatures, and found genomic signatures of vaccine responsiveness to bacterial pneumonia and seasonal influenza vaccines in older adults by building longitidunal human cohorts in collaboration with the UConn Center on Aging. Read more
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