Immunologist is associate dean for scientific affairs

Ruth R. Montgomery, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, has been named associate dean for scientific affairs. In this role Montgomery will oversee core research facilities, institutional grants and site visits, research policies and regulation, as well as school-wide planning related to research space. She succeeds Sara Rockwell, Ph.D., professor emeritus of therapeutic radiology and pharmacology.

From 2004 to 2013 Montgomery served as director of confocal microscopy for the department of internal medicine. In 2013 she launched a new cytometry Time of Flight (CyTOF) core at the School of Medicine. CyTOF enables cells to be tagged with heavy metal-coupled antibodies and analyzed by time-of-flight mass spectrometry, making it possible to resolve more than 40 cell types and functional markers in a single assay. She remains director of the CyTOF core and active in her research lab.

Montgomery earned her bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Pennsylvania and her doctorate at the Rockefeller University, where she studied macrophage biology. She came to Yale in 1988 for postdoctoral training, and stayed on as a research scientist in rheumatology.

Montgomery has become well-known for her studies of human immune responses to the tick-borne bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and to West Nile Virus, and the effects of aging on the innate immune system. Her research has been widely recognized for the use of novel technology to explore immune-related mechanisms in primary human cells.