Preprint Club
A cross-institutional Journal Club Initiative
The Community
The initiative consists of a team of immunologists from a number of participating institutions including:
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Icahn School of Medicine (Mount Sinai, NY, USA)
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Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and the the Viral Immunology Unit (University of Oxford, GB)
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Center for Infectious Medicine (CIM) & Center for Molecular Medicine (CIM) (Karolinska Institute, Sweden)
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Department of Immunology (University of Toronto, Canada)
Together, we are exploring new approaches to academic peer reviewing by involving a broader research community.
Coordinators
Felix Richter was a PhD student in the Simon lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford.
He is now working in the Bergthaler lab at the Medical University of Vienna and CeMM.
He is co-founder of the Preprint Club Initiative.
Nicolas Vabret is an Assistant Professor of Immunology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
He is co-founder of the Preprint Club Initiative.
Ester Gea-Mallorquí is a postdoctoral fellow in the Rowland-Jones lab at the Centre of Immuno-Oncology at the University of Oxford. She is interested in the interplay between viruses and the immune system, with a particular interest in viral immune evasion and antigen presentation.
She is also curates the Preprint Club Twitter account.
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Yavuz Yazicioglu is a PhD student in the Clarke lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on how cellular metabolism shapes immune responses in B cells.
Nicolas Ruffin is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Molecular Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. His research aims at exploring the mechanisms of lymphocyte activation at the root of Multiple Sclerosis.
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Zhi Yi Wong is a PhD student in the Coles/Buckley lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on fibroblasts control the positioning and compartmentalisation of immune cells in the peripheral tissues.
Micon Garvilles is DPhil student in the Coles/Buckley group at the Kennedy Institute, Oxford. Her research is focused on elucidating the mechanism of CLIC5 ion transporter in immune and stromal cells in health and inflammation in the context of arthritis and inflammasome-mediated diseases.
Reviewers
Ashley Reid is a PhD student in the Bhardwaj Lab at Mount Sinai. She studies the interaction between epigenetic therapy-induced transposable element expression and immunotherapy in cancer.
Laura Palma Medina is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Infectious Medicine at the Karolinska Institute. Her research focuses on understanding the host-pathogen interactions leading to the rapid development of necrotizing soft tissue infections.
Isabela Pedroza-Pacheco is a postdoctoral fellow in the Borrow/McMichael lab in the Viral Immunology Unit at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on cellular and molecular mechanisms underpinning the immune-regulatory environment that modulates germinal centre responses.
David Arcia-Anaya is a postdoctoral researcher in the Elliott lab at the Oxford Centre for Immuno-Oncology. His research focuses on the evaluation of T cells with different avidities against cancer cells, and their association with immune activation and exhaustion.
Ewoud Compeer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dustin lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Oxford. He uses state-of-the-art microscopy to study immune cell remodelling supporting immune cell-cell communication, ultimately driving immunotherapy and vaccine development.
Julie M. Mazet is a PhD student in the Gerard Lab at the Kennedy Institute, Oxford. Her research focuses on defining the dynamic relationship between IFN-g and CD8+ T cell dysfunction in cancer.
Dorothée Berthold is a PhD student in the Udalova lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on deciphering the role of innate immune cells at the onset of colitis.
Matthew Brown is a graduate student in the Bhardwaj lab at Mount Sinai.
His primary research interest is the use of precision medicine in translational research to enhance drug and vaccine development.
Rebecca Jeffery is a PhD student in the Powrie lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on understanding the role of the microbiome in the development of intestinal inflammation.
Michelle Tran is an MD/PhD student in the Bhardwaj lab at Mount Sinai. She is interested in uncovering biomarkers and mechanisms of resistance to bladder cancer immunotherapies.
John Hamp is a postdoctoral fellow in the Jostins lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. His research is on both immunological and transcriptomic responses to cellular activation in T Cells focusing on chronic inflammatory diseases.
Miriam Saffern is a PhD student in the Samstein lab, part of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai. She uses both computational and experimental approaches to study cancer risk and immune surveillance.
Aljawharah Alrubayyi is a PhD student in the Rowland-Jones/Peppa lab in the Viral Immunology Unit at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on interplay between viruses and the immune system, with a particular interest in innate immune responses to chronic viral infections.
Matthew Lin is a MD/PhD student in the Brody lab at Mount Sinai. He studies the function of T cell immunotherapy in clearing antigen-escape tumors and is
interested in combining genomic engineering with immunotherapy.
Ghada Alsaleh is a postdoctoral fellow in the Simon lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Oxford. She is studying the age-related decline of autophagy in memory T and B cells to uncover novel drug targets that may increase vaccination efficiency in the ageing context.
Verena van der Heide is a postdoctoral fellow in the Homann and Kamphorst labs at Mount Sinai. Her research interests focus on the induction, regulation and modulation of CD8 T cell responses in acute/chronic viral infections and autoimmune disease
Barbora Schonfeldova is a PhD student in the Udalova lab at the University of Oxford. She studies synovial macrophages in the context of inflammatory arthritis.
Natalie Vaninov is a PhD student in the Samstein lab. Her work integrates both computational and experimental approaches to study the role of tumor-intrinsic differences on the myeloid compartment and how this drives response to cancer immunotherapies.
Wanlin He is a PhD student in the McMichael lab in the Viral Immunology Unit, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on exploring the trafficking pathway of MHC-E and how MHC-E presents pathogen-derived peptides to CD8+ T cells.
Samarth Hegde is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Miriam Merad at Mount Sinai. He is interested in understanding myeloid regulation across tissue types and in response to distal tumor cues.
Lauren Chang is a PhD student in the Schotsaert lab at Mount Sinai. She is interested in understanding the role of eosinophils and other granulocytes in the context of respiratory viral infections such as influenza.
Matthew Park is a MD/PhD student in the Merad lab at Mount Sinai. He is involved in the profiling of the immunological changes associated with tissue-specific remodeling during physiological aging and tumorigenesis using novel fate-mapping models and high throughput sequencing.
Tim O'Donnell is a bioinformatician in the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai. His work focuses on T cell epitope prediction for cancer vaccines.
Jenna Newman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Bhardwaj lab at Mount Sinai. Her primary field of study is neoantigen-reactive CD8+ T cells in the tumor microenvironment.
Alice Chen-Liaw is an MD/PhD student in the Faith lab at Mount Sinai. She is interested in quantifying bacterial strain diversity in the human gut microbiome and investigating the colitogenicity of microbiome function over time.
Elena Brenna is a postdoctoral fellow in the McMichael lab at the Viral Immunology Unit at the University of Oxford. Her research aims to investigate the role of different cellular components in germinal centres during immune responses.
India Brough is a PhD student at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on understanding how intestinal microbiota can drive inflammatory arthritis.
Stephanie Longet is a postdoctoral fellow in immunology specialised in infectious diseases and vaccines at the University of Oxford. Her research is focused on antibody responses induced by Ebola virus, Lassa virus and SARS-CoV-2 infections.
Luisanna Pia is a PhD student in Brian Brown's lab at Mount Sinai. She applies CRISPR genomics to understand the spatial architecture of the tumor microenvironment.
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Rahul Ravindran is a PhD student at the University of Oxford and training in clinical gastroenterology. His research focuses on inflammatory bowel disease and particularly how the lymphatic system may aid the resolution of intestinal inflammation.
Zerina Kurtovic is a PhD student in the Svensson lab at the Center for Molecular Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. Her research focus are macrophages in the dorsal root ganglia and their importance in chronic pain conditions.
Eveline Van Gompel is a PhD student in Lundberg lab at Karolinska Institutet and in the Tissue Homeostasis and Disease lab at KU Leuven. Her research focusses on the role of autoantibodies and antigen-specific B cells in idiopathic inflammatory myopathies.
Bethany Charlton is a PhD student in the Rowland-Jones lab at the Centre for Immuno-Oncology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the interplay between viruses and the immune system, especially regarding the antigenic processing pathway in viral infections.
Mezida Saeed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Microbiology, Tumour and Cell Biology department at Karolinska Institutet. Her research focusses on the role of the actin cytoskeleton in the regulation of immune cell functions in the context of pathophysiologies due to inborn errors in actin regulators.
Max Quastel is a PhD student in the Gillespie/McMichael lab at the Centre for Immuno-Oncology at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on HLA-E peptide complexes in relation to HIV, TB, and cancer, and developing therapeutics based on this platform.
Matilde Oviedo Querejazu is a project assistant at Centre for Molecular Medicine at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Her primary research field is both in neurobiology and immunology.
Lisha Jeena is a PhD student in the Rowland-Jones lab in the Cancer Immunology Unit at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the effect of chronic inflammation on musculoskeletal health in adolescents with HIV compared to those without HIV.
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Vivian Lau is a PhD student in the Gerard lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on cytokine crosstalk between tumour cells and immune cells within the tumour microenvironment.
Abishek Vaidya is a PhD student in Alice Kamphorst's lab at Mount Sinai. He studies the differentiation of PD-1+ CD8 T cells into functional effector-like cells, including the helper role of CD4 T cells in the context of cancer and chronic infections.
Yonina Bykov is a PhD student in the Garcia-Sastre lab at Mount Sinai. She is studying a novel oncolytic virus and is interested in targeted design of oncolytic virotherapy approaches to overcome resistance
Oksana Goroshchuk is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Neurology at Yale University and is affiliated to the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. Her research explores the effect of sex hormones on T lymphocytes and sex bias in multiple sclerosis.
Prerna Suri is a PhD student in the Samstein Lab at Mount Sinai. Her research focusses on understanding the influence of DNA Damage Repair genes on the immune landscape of tumors.
Mariana Borsa is a postdoctoral fellow in the Simon Lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on understanding the role of organelle segregation in T cell fate determination.
Susanne Neumann is a PhD student in the Brundin lab at the Karolinska Institute. Her research focuses on deciphering the role of Hydrogen Peroxide as signaling molecule in adult neural stem cell differentiation.
Eduardo I. Cardenas is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. His research focuses on airway host defense in the context of infections and chronic inflammatory conditions such as asthma and COPD.
Graham Britton is an Instructor in the Faith lab at Mount Sinai. He is a mucosal immunologist and microbiome scientist with a broad interest in the role of microbiota in health and disease and the application of microbiota-targeting therapeutics.
Jaime Mateus-Tique is a PhD student in the Brown Lab at Mount Sinai. His research focuses on engineering novel CAR-T for solid tumor therapy.
Quang Nguyen is a DPhil student in the lab of Prof. Persephone Borrow at the Centre for Immuno-Oncology, University of Oxford. His research explores the diversity of CD8+ T cells in human secondary lymphoid tissues that modulate germinal centre responses in the development of humoral immunity.
Austeja Baleviciute is a PhD student in Bertrand Joseph’s group at Karolinska Institutet. Her research focuses on the role of microglia subtypes in pediatric and adult brain tumor progression and resistance to treatment.
Brendan Cordeiro is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dunn lab at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on Multiple Sclerosis (MS), specifically on the interaction between obesity and sex-differences on MS pathogenesis.
Hanh Luong is physician in anatomical pathology (pathologist). She obtained her PhD in 2021 and now works as a postdoc at the Center for Molecular Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. Her research focus on lymphoma and cancer-associated autoimmune diseases.
Lucas Baldran-Groves is PhD student working in Immuno-oncology at the department of Oncology-Pathology of Karolinska Institute, with a focus on resistance mechanisms of solid tumors to T-cell based immunotherapies.
External Partners
Institutional Partner: Mount Sinai
The Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (PrIISM) is an entity that encompasses and integrates immunological research programs and technology centers. PrIISM is working to better understand the fundamental mechanisms used by immune cells to promote disease progression and response to treatment, developing and implementing novel technologies to better diagnose and guide treatment of disease, and generating new therapies to modulate the immune system in a broad spectrum of diseases, including cancer, inflammatory, cardiovascular, and neurological diseases.
Our mission would not not be achievable without reliable partners that support the initiative and are crucial to the success of the cross-institutional immunology preprint journal club.
Institutional Partner: University of Oxford - Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology & Centre for Immuno-oncology
The Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology (KIR) has more than 25 research groups working in the areas of immunity and microbiome, inflammation biology and tissue remodelling and regeneration. Our studies provide insight into the biological processes that cause pathways to malfunction in disease, and our research teams have joined coordinated efforts to understand the host response to COVID-19.
The Centre for Immuno-oncology (CIO) at the University of Oxford focuses on specific immune responses to tumours and chronic infections. By investigating the evolution of immune responses during disease progression we hope to discover better correlates of protection and better antigens to target for therapy and interception. The CIO belongs to a large and dispersed community of immunologists working in the cancer field and in cancer-relevant areas - called the Oxford Cancer Immuno-Oncology Network or OCION.
Communications Partner: Nature Reviews Immunology
Nature Reviews Immunology is a monthly review journal, staffed by a team of full-time professional editors, that provides in-depth coverage of all areas of immunology, from fundamental mechanisms to applied aspects. In addition to our review articles, we highlight recent developments and exciting new primary papers in the field, as well as reflecting on the people, papers and events that have influenced the development of immunology. We publish regular ‘Preprint Watch’ Journal Club pieces in collaboration with the Preprint Club to provide our readers with a short summary of early data of potential interest.
Institutional Partner: Karolinska Institutet
The Karolinska Institute (KI) is a research-lead medical university located in Stockholm, Sweden. Currently, the researchers engaged in the preprint journal club belong to several departments at KI but most work at the Center for Molecular Medicine (CMM) located in Solna and the Center for Infectious Medicine (CIM) in Huddinge. Our research focuses on advancing our understanding of immune responses in health and diseases, performing experimental and clinical research for the benefit of the patients.
Institutional Partner: University of Toronto
The Department of Immunology at the University of Toronto hosts >65 investigators across 7 Toronto-wide locations. Research teams within the department cover a very broad spectrum of immunology, reaching from basic adaptive and innate immune mechanisms, tissue immunity, chronic and acute inflammatory conditions, cancer immunity, microbiome studies, neuroinflammation and immune cell engineering. Together we strive to advance biomedical discoveries in Immunology, increase our understanding of fundamental Immunological principles and develop new applications for immune-based therapies.
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