Humans for Education is on a mission to end extreme poverty in our lifetime by providing financial and health-related solutions which empower children, families, and entire communities.

Working in the Pate Lab I focus on bioinformatics and machine learning algorithms to elucidate the role of lung megakaryocytes in infectious diseases.

Dr. Peter Nigrovic with a focus on megakaryocytes.

Department of Rheumatology, Inflammation, and Immunity

Department of Comparative Medicine

Dr. Craig Morrel's Laboratory; Characterization of lung megakaryocytes and their role in adaptive immunity.

Department of Lung Biology

Lung Mks are able to present antigenPlatelet and Red Blood Cell Seminar

Harvard Blood and Bones Seminar

TEDx: Talk about ways millennials can get involved in change

Department of Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology

My research project probes the efficiency of engineered cytotoxic CD8+ cells on HIV reservoir clearance. Collectively our lab has developed a mouse T-cell receptor (mTCR) that specifically recognizes an epitope of HIV, thus allowing these CD8+ cells to more specifically recognize and clear HIV infected cells. CD8+ cells that ectopically express the mTCR are activated in an antigen-specific fashion and, when co-incubated with a HIV peptide, activation increases in a dose dependent manner. As well, I have started collaborating on a second project, which aims to understand the dynamic relationship between platelets and T-cells and their interaction with TGF-β in regard to cell growth.

The last summer before graduating college (2013) I was on my way to an immunology internship at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). Immediately I began working on a project, which studied the effect of IL-23 on Th17 cell generation. It was in Japan that I began to gain a respect for science that only comes with the maturity of research exposure. The post-doc I was working with and I spent countless hours isolating lymph nodes and spleens from mice so we could probe the effects of T-cell differentiation in the presence of IL-23 and IL-6. During my short summer in Japan, the post-doc and I discovered novel proteins that were present during stimulation of IL-23 via immunoprecipitation techniques, western blotting, and eventually mass spectrometry (MS), which is still the foundation of ongoing research in this lab.