The study of how the immune system works in health and disease has led to significant scientific breakthroughs in treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases in addition to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. While the Center for Vaccines & Immunology focuses on infections, pathogenesis, and vaccine development, the investigators are also using these tools to understand the basic tenets of how the immune system functions to translate this knowledge into new therapies that have broad-reaching impacts on the field of immunological research. The combination of expertise in parasitic, fungal, and viral immunology in the Center for Vaccines & Immunology provide a broad array of infection systems for understanding the immune system with the long-term goal of providing information that leads to new therapies to address immune-related diseases and develop long-lasting preventative and therapeutic strategies to combat infectious diseases.

Participating Faculty and Labs

Geert-Jan Boons, PhD, UGA Distinguished Professor in Biochemical Sciences

Glycans | Host-guest interactions | Emerging viruses and risk assessment | Vaccine-elicited immunity

Chet Joyner, PhD, Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases, Assistant Director of the Center for Vaccines & Immunology

Understanding the mechanistic basis of immunological memory | Molecular biology of B cells and plasma cells

Kim Klonowski, PhD, Associate Professor of Cellular Biology

Host response to respiratory viral infection | Development of immunological memory | Tissue-specific immunity | T cell immunity across the lifespan

Sam Kurup, PhD, Associate Professor of Biology of Parasitism

Mechanism of natural and acquired immunity to malaria | Regulatory T cell biology | T cell antigen discovery

Nathan E. Lewis, PhD, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Center for Molecular Medicine and Complex Carbohydrate Research Center

Design and optimization of vaccine glycoproteins | Vaccine manufacturing | Systems biology | Cell-cell communication in immunology

Karen Norris, PhD, Professor of Infectious Diseases, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, Charles H. Wheatley Endowed Chair in Translational Biomedical Science

Host responses to invasive fungal infections | Development of broadly reactive pan-fungal vaccine | Development of anti-fungal monoclonal antibody therapeutics

Whitney Rabacal, PhD, Research Assistant Professor

Broadly reactive pan-fungal vaccines | Anti-fungal monoclonal antibody therapeutics | Development of animal models of invasive fungal diseases

S. Mark Tompkins, PhD, UGA Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Virology and Immunology, Director of the Center for Vaccines & Immunology

Host response to respiratory pathogen infection | Pathogen-pathogen interactions | Emerging viruses and risk assessment | Vaccine-elicited immunity