The medical school will welcome Sarah Gaffen, PhD, in December as the featured speaker for Seminars in Investigative Medicine.
Dr. Gaffen’s presentation – “All Things Great and Seventeen: IL-17 signaling in autoimmunity versus fungal infections” – is scheduled for noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, December 18, in TBL 2 at the W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus in downtown Kalamazoo. A pizza lunch from Erbelli’s will be provided for attendees.
The event is free and MEDU credit is available. If you plan to attend, please register here.
Dr. Gaffen is the Gerald P. Rodnan Endowed Professor in the Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh and a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She also serves as president of the International Cytokine and Interferon Society.
Dr. Gaffen did her undergraduate training at Carnegie Mellon University and received her PhD from The University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of National Academy of Science member Dr. Marian Koshland. She did postdoctoral work at UC San Francisco and was on the faculty at SUNY Buffalo from 1999-2008, where she initiated her work on defining mechanisms of signaling by the then-enigmatic IL-17 receptor cytokine family.
Since 2008, she has been at the University of Pittsburgh, and was honored with the Gerald P. Rodnan Chair in 2015. Dr. Gaffen is one of the pioneers of studies of the signaling functions and structural features of the IL-17 receptor. Her lab also works on understanding the basis for immunity to infections and autoimmunity, with a major interest in the mechanisms that underlie oral mucosal immunity and antifungal host defense.
Seminars in Investigative Medicine is a research seminar series at WMed aimed at bringing together the community of investigators both within – and outside — the medical school.