Ellen F Foxman, MD, PhD

Dr. Ellen Foxman, M.D., PhD. is an Assistant Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies the fundamental biology of the airway epithelial development and innate immune signaling, and implications for the diagnosis and prevention of viral respiratory illness.

Background. Dr. Foxman is an immunologist and clinical pathologist. She trained in medicine and immunology at Stanford University. In Dr. Eugene Butcher’s group, she investigated leukocyte homing and the role of short term memory of prior chemotactic signals in allowing neutrophils to reach their target sites within tissues. She became interested in respiratory viruses during her residency training in clinical pathology at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital, due to the advances in testing that were beginning to reveal a previously unappreciated very high prevalence of these viruses. She later joined Dr. Akiko Iwasaki’s group at Yale as a post-doctoral associate, where she studied antiviral innate immunity, demonstrating suppression of innate immune responses in the airway epithelium by cool ambient temperature. In 2016, she established her independent research group studying host-virus interactions in the respiratory tract.