Abstract:
Macrophages are innate immune cells that fight infections, repair tissues, and contribute to maintaining tissue homeostasis. Macrophages exhibit extensive cell-to-cell heterogeneity, and my lab is interested in how functional responses emerge from this complexity. I will discuss how my lab has combined single-cell measurements with computational analyses to explore how macrophage interactions via paracrine signaling regulate the collective inflammatory response in vitro. I will also discuss our efforts to resolve macrophage heterogeneity in the more complex environment of melanoma tumors and how this impacts response to combinatorial immunotherapy.

Bio:
Dr. Kathryn Miller-Jensen is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. Her lab combines experimental and computational approaches to study signaling and transcriptional regulation in the immune system, with a focus on how intercellular heterogeneity drives disease phenotypes. Recent work in the lab explores the regulation of functional heterogeneity in macrophages in inflammation, and how macrophage-mediated extracellular signaling networks shape the tumor microenvironment. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Cancer Research Institute. Prof. Miller-Jensen is an NSF CAREER Award recipient and a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers. She was an NIH NSRA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and she holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.