Researchers
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Roberto Caricchio, MD
Dr. Caricchio is the Myles J. McDonough Chair in Rheumatology and professor of medicine at UMass Chan Medical School.
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Elena Gkrouzman, MD
Dr. Gkrouzman is a rheumatologist at UMass with special interest in autoimmune disorders such as Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and Antiphospholipid Syndrome. Dr. Gkrouzman completed her rheumatology fellowship at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and has received a master’s degree in Clinical and Translational Investigation from Weill Cornell Medicine. She is RhMSUS-certified to perform musculoskeletal ultrasounds in her field.
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Kate A. Fitzgerald, PhD
Dr. Fitzgerald is a professor of medicine, Director of the Program in Innate Immunity, and the Worcester Foundation Chair in Biomedical Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. Fitzgerald directs an internationally recognized laboratory focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms controlling the inflammatory response in both health and disease. Her group is interested in determining how the immune system distinguishes friend from foe in order to protect the host from infection and avoid damaging inflammatory responses that lead to a wide range of inflammatory diseases. Her lab uses multifaceted approaches including immunology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics to understand the role of inflammasomes, nucleic acid sensing pathways, and long non-coding RNAs in the inflammatory response. The long-term goal of her work is to determine how inappropriate activation of innate immunity underlies the pathogenesis of infectious, inflammatory, and autoimmune diseases in humans.
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Manuel Garber, PhD
Dr. Garber is an associate professor of medicine in the Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology, and Program in Molecular Medicine. He is also the Bioinformatics core director. Dr. Garber continues to study lincRNAs and in particular their evolutionary history, as well as the systematic dissection of the transcriptional regulation of the immune response.
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John E. Harris, MD, PhD
Dr. Harris is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Dermatology at UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. Harris directs the Vitiligo Clinic and Research Center at UMass, which incorporates a specialty clinic for the diagnosis and treatment of patients with vitiligo, as well as a vitiligo research laboratory. He uses basic, translational, and clinical research approaches to better understand autoimmunity in the skin, with a particular focus on developing more effective treatments.
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Ann Marshak-Rothstein, PhD
Dr. Marshak-Rothstein is a professor of medicine in the Division of Rheumatology at UMass Chan Medical School. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Marshak-Rothstein's scientific interests include systemic autoimmune diseases, including systemic lupus erythematosus and scleroderma.
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Kerstin Nundel, PhD
Dr. Nundel's research interest lies in understanding how the balance between self and non-self-recognition is achieved in the immune system. Currently, she is investigating the role of nucleic acid sensing TLRs in B cell tolerance, survival, differentiation, and migration. Her in vitro studies on autoreactive B cells are accompanied by studying the mechanisms of B cell activation and migration by self-antigens in mouse models of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE). Dr. Nundel's work on B cell migration in SLE is currently funded by a grant from the Lupus Research Alliance, in which she is testing already approved cancer treatments to decrease end-organ damage by inhibiting B cell migration.
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Zaida G. Ramirez-Ortiz, PhD
Dr. Ramirez-Ortiz is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School. Her main interest is the initiation of the inflammatory response mediated by scavenger receptors expressed on dendritic cells in health and disease models.
Publications
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Mehdi Rashighi-Firoozabadi
Dr. Rashighi is a dermatologist at UMass. He treats patients in his clinics, and performs translational research studies with a suction blister biopsy technique to examine cells, proteins and nucleic acids in the skin of patients with autoimmune skin diseases including CLE.
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Jillian Richmond, PhD
Jillian Richmond, PhD, is an assistant professor on the tenure track in the Department of Dermatology at UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. Richmond earned her undergraduate degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Johns Hopkins University and her doctoral degree in Pathology and Immunology from Boston University School of Medicine. She performed a postdoctoral fellowship in chemokine biology at Massachusetts General Hospital before moving to the Harris Lab at UMass Chan Medical School to study chemokines in the autoimmune skin disease vitiligo. Her translational research in vitiligo has helped spur the development of clinical trials at UMass. Her current research, which is funded by the Lupus Research Alliance, the Dermatology Foundation, and The Department of Defense Lupus Research Program, focuses on how T cells navigate through the skin during Cutaneous Lupus Erythematosus (CLE). She plans to test inhibitors of chemokines and upstream signaling molecules as potential novel treatments for CLE.
