The Wagar lab investigates how human immune responses to infectious diseases and vaccines are initiated, regulated, and resolved in tissues. Our long-term goals are to understand how the specialized immune microenvironment of lymphoid and mucosal tissues regulates adaptive immunity and to define mechanisms by which we can manipulate these processes to improve protective immunity in humans. Ultimately, we aspire to leverage this information to accelerate vaccine and immunotherapy design and define correlates of protection.

To address these questions, the lab uses a novel immune organoid model that is composed of primary human lymphoid and mucosal tissues to achieve 3 main goals: (1) to improve the translational value of vaccine immunology studies, (2) to allow previously-impossible mechanistic experiments to be done with human samples and (3) to appreciate how inter-individual differences in our genes and environment contribute to immune variation. We study these factors in the context of vaccines and infectious diseases, with a particular interest in immune responses against respiratory infections.