Chair’s Letter – December 2024
Dear friends,
The holidays are a time of reflection, and perhaps for me this year more so than ever. For me, this has been a year of “launching” in both my personal and professional lives. My eldest daughter headed off to college, while ideas that I proposed for UW Immunology took shape – new initiatives, new assistant professors and new scientific directions. It may sound strange to compare the two, but these have been surprisingly parallel experiences that have been exciting, scary, gratifying and challenging, each in their own ways.
When I became chair in 2022, one of my first priorities was to better support our postdoctoral fellows. The UW School of Medicine generously provided seed funding to start the Institute for Translational Immunology (ITI) to fund and train postdoctoral fellows for diverse scientific careers in immunology. Together with our Program Director Alison Stanbery, PhD, and Program Manager Renee Ireton, PhD, we have created a program that serves as an innovative framework for re-envisioned postdoctoral fellowships, with our first three ITI fellowships awarded this fall. We’ve heard from our thriving alumni network that many of you are excited to support this endeavor, so on May 19, 2025, we’ll host our first-ever ITI & Alumni Symposium! In 2025, we’ll also launch PROPEL NW, our new two year post-baccalaureate program that will provide research opportunities and mentorship for recent undergraduates applying to graduate school.
Building the Department of Immunology was another immediate goal of mine, initiated with the hiring of Autumn York, PhD, who started as a tenure-track Assistant Professor last year and is currently thriving with two new graduate students and a recent paper in Nature. We are equally thrilled to welcome Aakanksha Jain, PhD, who will start in summer 2025 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Aakanksha will join us after completing postdoctoral work at Boston Children’s Hospital with mentor Clifford J. Woolf, where she was awarded a K99/R00 career transition award. Her exciting work on neuroimmunology and pain will create a new niche for the department and many opportunities for collaboration. We also welcome new Affiliate Professor Ananda Goldrath, PhD, Executive Vice President and Director of the Allen Institute for Immunology, and new Adjunct Assistant Professor Patrick Mitchell, PhD, Assistant Professor in UW’s Department of Microbiology. We were very sad to say goodbye to Professor Michael Gale, Jr., PhD, who accepted a position as Director of the new University of Minnesota Institute on Infectious Diseases and head of their Department of Microbiology and Immunology. Lastly, we’ve made some important additions to our administrative staff: Administrative Specialist Sarah Kremen-Hicks, and Grants and Contracts Manager Elena Schroeder.
We continue to attract excellent trainees with five students entering the UW Immunology graduate program in 2024 (7% acceptance rate). They are currently completing their first rotations while six of their later-stage colleagues defended their dissertations. We are also very proud of our dynamic community of postdocs, more than half of whom have been awarded highly competitive fellowship funding. An exciting new scientific direction for UW Immunology was initiated with the launch of the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, a landmark collaboration between the Allen Institute, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington. A major focus of the SeaHub is to apply DNA recording technologies to record signals in immune cells, with the goal of someday creating programmable cells that can alter disease states.
I am so grateful to everyone in our community, especially our faculty who work tirelessly to support our trainees, drive and fund world class research programs in very difficult times, teach our classes and serve our department and the UW. I am also grateful for our alumni and emeriti who continue to support us through donations, job opportunities for our trainees and ongoing engagement. If you’d like to support us in 2025, please consider making a donation, becoming part of the ITI mentoring network or our alumni network. Please also get in touch if you have ideas for how we can continue to make UW Immunology an outstanding place to do immunological research. I wish you all a very happy, safe and restorative holiday season!
Best wishes,
Marion
Marion Pepper, PhD
Professor and Chair
Department of Immunology
University of Washington
