Dr. Michelle L. McKeague (née Miller) is the Assistant Director of Platforms at the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health at the University of Pennsylvania. After obtaining an A.B. in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis, she completed her Master's in Translational Research through the HHMI Med-Into-Grad program and her PhD studies in Pathology at the University of Chicago. Under the mentorship of Dr. Maria-Luisa Alegre, her dissertation research investigated mechanisms underlying organ transplantation tolerance and was funded by a T32 award from the NIH and two fellowships from the American Heart Association. She completed her postdoctoral training in tumor immunology in Dr. Olivera Finn's laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh with support from NCI T32 and F32 awards. Her current work focuses on scaling human immune system profiling across health and disease.
Dr. Jason Lohmueller is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Surgery in the Division of Surgical Oncology. Jason is an avid synthetic biologist and immunologist who found his love for engineering biology in the iGEM program. He obtained his B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in 2007 and as an undergraduate conducted BioE research in the lab of Jeffrey Morgan and evolutionary biology research in the lab of Eric S. Lander mentored by Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Insitute. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2013 from Pamela Silver’s lab engineering mammalian synthetic gene networks. He then conducted his postdoctoral training in Olivera Finn’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh developing monoclonal antibody and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell cancer immunotherapies, funded by an American Cancer Society fellowship. Dr. Lohmueller launched his independent laboratory in 2019 at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. The lab focuses on engineering synthetic receptors and gene circuits to improve adoptive cell therapies.
Dr. Olivera (Olja) J. Finn is a University of Pittsburgh Distinguished Professor of Immunology and Surgery. After receiving her PhD in Medical Microbiology at Stanford University in 1980 and completing her postdoctoral training in Immuno-oncology there in 1982, Dr. Finn started her research at Duke University and in 1991 moved to the University of Pittsburgh. She gained prominence through her basic and applied research on tumor antigens and cancer vaccines. Dr. Finn is a member of the American Association of Immunologists where she served as President in 2007/2008. She is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). Dr. Finn received numerous awards including the AAI Life Time Achievement Award (2016), the NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (2016), the AACR CIR Lloyd Old Cancer Immunology Prize (2017), and the SITC Richard Smalley Award (2019). In 2019 she was inducted into the inaugural class of AAI Distinguished Fellows and in 2022 became a Fellow of the SITC Immuno-Oncology Academy.
