Y-Age Faculty

Son of teachers, Deep grew up in Hisar (Northwest India). He studied Veterinary Medicine in India, did PhD Research in University of Hannover Germany and postdoc research in Morehouse School of Medicine and NIH. He currently holds Waldemar Von Zedtwitz endowed chair and is a Professor in the Departments of Pathology, Comparative Medicine and Immunobiology. Dixit is also the director of Yale Center for Research on Aging (Y-Age). Dixit lab studies Immunometabolism and aging. His team help establish NLRP3 inflammasome in causing ‘inflammaging’ and immunosenescence that leads to age-related chronic diseases including metabolic dysfunction. Dixit and his collaborators have identified that switch from glycolysis to ketogenesis deactivates the inflammasome and reduces immunopathology. The ongoing work in his laboratory on caloric restriction (CR) in humans (CALERIE-II trial), which extends lifespan in animal models has revealed that adaptation to negative energy balance in a host can be harnessed to identify immunometabolic CR-mimetics to improve health and potentially lifespan. Dixit lab has identified PLA2G7 and SPARC as the CR-inhibited proteins in humans that control inflammation and healthspan in mouse models.

Dr. Arnsten is an international expert on the molecular regulation of higher cortical circuits, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She received her B.A. in Neuroscience from Brown University in 1976 (where she created the Neuroscience major), and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCSD in 1981. She did post-doctoral research with Dr. Susan Iversen at Cambridge University in the UK, and with Dr. Patricia Goldman-Rakic at Yale. Dr. Arnsten's research examines the neural basis of higher cognition. Her work has revealed that the newly evolved cortical circuits that underlie higher cognition are uniquely regulated at the molecular level, conferring vulnerability in mental illness and age-related cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease. Arnsten's research has led to new treatments for cognitive disorders in humans, including the successful translation of guanfacine (IntunivTM) for the treatment of ADHD and related prefrontal cortical disorders.

Dr. Chang graduated with a BS from Yale College in 1988, and obtained his MD from Cornell University Medical College and his PhD from Rockefeller University in 1997. He completed residency in Clinical Pathology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and did his postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Ronald DePinho at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. He was an Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, before joining the faculty at Yale Medical School as a tenured Associate Professor in 2010. Dr. Chang's research interests focuses on how telomeres, protein/DNA structures at the ends of chromosomes, are properly maintained to protect chromosome ends from engaging a DNA damage response. Dr. Chang is the recipient of numerous awards, including those from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Ellsion Medical Foundation, the Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research, and the Ellis Benson Award from the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists. He was elected into the American Society of Clinical Investigation in 2009.Beginning in 2017, Dr. Chang is also the Associate Dean of Science Education and Quantitative Reasoning and Undergraduate Research at Yale College.

Dr. Rong Fan is the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Pathology. His research interest has been centered on the development and deployment of single-cell and spatial omics technologies to investigate normal development, aging, and disease. He received a B.S. in Applied Chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China, a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, and then completed his postdoctoral training at California Institute of Technology, prior to joining the faculty of Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University in 2010. He developed a microchip that allows for simultaneous measurement of 42 immune effector proteins in single cells at high throughput, which remains the highest multiplexing to date for a single-cell protein secretion assay. In collaboration with Novartis and Kite Pharma, it was applied to profiling antigen-specific activation states of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered T cells, resulting in the discovery of novel single-cell biomarkers including polyfunctional strength index to characterize the quality of CAR-T infusion products and predict the clinical responses and immune-related adverse effects(irAEs) prior to treatment. This microchip, called IsoCode, and the automation system, called IsoLight, have been commercialized by IsoPlexis, a company co-founded by Dr. Fan. Now, this system has been used by >100 major pharmaceutical companies and cancer centers around the world for monitoring CAR-T or checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies. Dr. Fan is also a pioneer in developing NGS-based spatial omics sequencing technologies. He conceived the concept of spatial multi-omics and developed the first spatially resolved multi-omics sequencing technology called DBiT-seq (Liu et al., Cell 183, 1665–1681, 2020) which allows for spatial co-profiling of whole transcriptome and hundreds of proteins (spatial-CITE-seq) at cellular level in complex tissues. He further developed a first-of-its-kind technology to enable spatial epigenome sequencing including spatial-ATAC-seq (Deng et al., Nature 609 (7926), 375-383, 2022) and spatial-CUT&Tag (Deng et al., Science 375 (6581), 681-686, 2022). These technologies may unlock a whole new field in spatial biology with applications in a wide range of biological and biomedical research. Dr. Fan co-founded IsoPlexis, Singleron Biotechnologies, and AtlasXomics. He is the recipient of multiple awards including the NCI Howard Temin Career Transition Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He has been elected to American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Tamas Horvath is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Medicine and Professor of Neurobiology and Ob/Gyn at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. He is also the Director for the Yale Program on Integrative Cell Signaling and Neurobiology of Metabolism. He received a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.) degree from the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree from the University of Szeged in Hungary. His research has been focusing on neuronal circuitries that support physiological and pathological homeostatic conditions, including processes associated with reproduction, energy metabolism and neurodegeneration.

Akiko Iwasaki, Ph.D., is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Canada and her postdoctoral training from the National Institutes of Health. Her research focuses on the mechanisms of immune defense against viruses at the mucosal surfaces, and the development of mucosal vaccine strategies. She is the co-Lead Investigator of the Yale COVID-19 Recovery Study, which aims to determine the changes in the immune response of people with long COVID after vaccination. Dr. Iwasaki also leads multiple other studies to interrogate the pathobiology of long COVID, both in patients, and through developing animal models of long COVID. Dr. Iwasaki was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2021, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Dr. Insoo Kang is Professor of Medicine (Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology) at Yale University School of Medicine. He completed his post-graduate training in rheumatology and immunology research at Yale. He has been on the faculty at Yale School of Medicine since 1999. He is a physician scientist with a research interest in understanding the human immune system using biological samples and clinical data. In particular, Dr. Kang has defined subsets of T cells with distinct cellular characteristics based on the expression of cytokine receptors on T cells in health and disease as well as the interactions of such cell subsets with monocytes and other immune cells.

I have been working in the broad fields of bioinformatics, machine learning, applied mathematics and dynamics of quantum fields.  My current research interests relate to development of spectral methods and unsupervised & supervised deep learning approaches for analyzing high dimensional genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics and proteomics data from various modalities.  I apply these methods in the context of cancer, immunobiology,  brain and phylogeny studies with the aim of revealing cell specific regulatory networks and characterizing biomarkers.

Medzhitov laboratory studies biology of inflammation, mechanisms of homoeostasis, allergic immunity and mechanisms of diseases.

Ruth R. Montgomery is a cellular immunologist with particular expertise in use of novel technology for human translational studies. Her research employs systems wide studies to identify individual differences in immune responses that lead to divergent outcomes to infection. Her group focuses on effects of aging on innate immunity and individual variation influencing susceptibility to West Nile, dengue, Zika and COVID-19 viruses, and inflammatory profiling of patients with sickle cell disease. She has overseen studies of immune responsiveness in human cohorts with successful enrollment of >2000 healthy individuals. Dr. Montgomery’s work is notable for her use of primary human cells to demonstrate immune related mechanisms and illuminate potential avenues for therapeutic interventions. She launched the CyTOF facility at Yale in 2013, was co-chair of the University Provost’s ITS Advisory Committee (ITSAC), and serves as Associate Dean for Scientific Affairs.

Dr. Shaw is a graduate of Harvard College who completed his M.D. training at Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Philip Leder. After completing his clinical training in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Fred Alt. Dr. Shaw joined the faculty at Yale in 2001, and is currently Professor of Medicine in the Section of Infectious Diseases. His research focuses on the immunology of aging, and his laboratory has interests in age-associated alterations in innate immune function and vaccine response in humans, as well as circadian regulation of immune response and mechanisms of inflammatory dysregulation in medication-associated treatment of opioid use disorder.  He was a Howard Hughes Postdoctoral Physician Research Fellow, Brookdale National Fellow, and T. Franklin Williams Scholar, and he is a Fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America and member of the Interurban Clinical Club.

Josien van Wolfswinkel received her M.Sc. in Cell Biology from Utrecht University, Netherlands. For her graduate research she worked in the laboratories of Ronald Plasterk, Albert Heck, and Rene Ketting at Utrecht University and the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology to study the molecular mechanism of RNA interference in the nematode C. elegans. She did her postdoctoral research in the lab of Peter Reddien at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research / MIT, working on the RNA biology of stem cells using the flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea as a model system. She now continues this work in her own lab in the Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology.

I obtained my AB from Harvard University and my MD, PhD degrees in 2011 from University of Texas Southwestern with additional training done at the University of Paris. As a part of his MD/PhD training in the laboratories of Drs. Edward Wakeland and Chandra Mohan, I identified a key role for the CXCR4/SDF-1 axis in end-organ targeting (in mouse and man), an important insight in the pathogenesis of SLE. I then did my Internal Medicine internship and residency training at Yale and joined the ABIM Short Track Pathway into the Rheumatology fellowship. I joined the laboratory of Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov in July 2014 for my postdoctoral training.  There, based on my clinical experience as a house officer, I shifted my focus to understanding how inflammation and metabolism are coordinated on an organismal level.  My work in Dr. Medzhitov's laboratory led to the discovery that different inflammatory states are coordinated with different metabolic programs, an important insight into the pathogenesis of many inflammatory diseases.  I joined the faculty as Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine (Rheumatology) in August 2017 and the Immunobiology faculty in July 2019.My lab is generally interested in trying to understand how the environment interacts with the host to affect disease trajectories. We utilize a broad range of techniques spanning disciplines spanning physiology, metabolism, inflammation, neurobiology, and immunology coupled with patient samples. On-going interests:1. Identifying and dissecting environmental determinants of inflammatory diseases. 2. Understanding inflammatory physiology3. Understanding placebo and nocebo physiology.4. Understanding the "moonlighting" functions of the immune system.5. Understanding energy allocation in host defense. (Collaboration with Dr. Rachel Perry)6. Understanding the relationship between cell death and inflammation. (Collaboration with Dr. Aaron Ring)In the clinic, I see patients with inflammatory conditions, many of the times with no clear diagnosis, as well as patients with rheumatologic diseases.

Dr. Qin Yan (严钦) is a Professor of Pathology at Yale Medical School and a member of Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, Yale Stem Cell Center, Yale Center for Immuno-Oncology, and Yale Center for Research on Aging. He directs a research laboratory to elucidate the roles of epigenetic mechanisms that drive tumor initiation and progression and to translate their findings to the clinic. His laboratory has made significant contributions to the understanding of the KDM5 H3K4me3/2 histone demethylases and epigenetic regulators of immune evasion and cancer metastasis. Dr. Yan received his B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. After his Ph.D. training on regulation of transcription and ubiquitination with Drs. Joan and Ronald Conaway at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and Stowers Institute for Medical Research, he completed his postdoctoral training on cancer biology with Nobel laureate Dr. William Kaelin at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He has received a number of awards including the ASIP Outstanding Investigator Award, Era of Hope Scholar Award from DoD Breast Cancer Research Program, Stewart Fellow Award and V Scholar Award.

My interest in microbes started in college when I did a research project on Trypanosomes, the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness. I was struck with how the membrane of the parasite changed its surface antigens to circumvent the host immune response.  My interest in the host microbe relationship continued during my MD/Ph.D., during which my thesis work focused on Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV), the cause of chicken pox and shingles.  We demonstrated that the VZV virus had co-evolved to become highly dependent on the cellular signaling proteins JNK and ERK, which was beautifully illustrated when we found that the virus had hijacked these cellular proteins and had incorporated them into the virion.  My research interests inspired my choice to pursue Infectious Diseases as a specialty.During my Infectious Disease fellowship at Yale, my clinical experiences repeatedly demonstrated that different human hosts respond very diferrently to infection.  The same microbe could produce a mild disease in one person, and an overwhelming sepsis in an another.  I especially noted that both older adults and HIV-infected individuals had particularly different responses.  With each patient I saw, the important role the host response plays in infection was underscored.   Overall, my clinical experiences have solidified the importance of the host-microbe relationship, and have pushed me to further understand the host innate immune response through my research.