Welcome to Sam Kim & Mariam Mohagheghi, who officially joined the lab this Spring for their graduate studies! Also, congratulations to Erika, Evien and Haven, who wrapped up their CALIT2 project and presented their work at the annual CALIT2 symposium.

The lab has a lot to celebrate this Spring! The month begun by sending off some labbies to present their fantastic work at AAI in Honolulu.  Suhas and Patricia were awarded the AAI Trainee Abstract Award to give oral presentations of their work at the conference. Mahina also received an Abstract Award and presented posters Read More…

Congratulations Zach and Tim on the new publication! With their combined efforts, plus lots of help from the whole team, we identifed several novel correlates of neutralizing antibody responses to flu vaccine. It was cool to see that new predictors identified from the organoids could be validated in vivo! Check out the paper here.

Erika, Evien and Haven successfully applied for and received funding from CALIT2 x UROP for their team project. This award is given to undergraduate interdisciplinary research teams led by a graduate student. Congratulations!

The Wagar lab cleaned up this quarter! Mahina and Erika both received T32 fellowship support, and Mahina and Zach were both awarded for their excellent contributions to the UCI annual immunology symposium.

Wow, it has been a busy summer. New postdoc Dr. Katrina Evans joined the lab to work on novel vaccine formulations and understanding how and why they work via mechanistic work in immune organoids. Congratulations to PhD students Mahina Mitul and Erika Joloya who successfully competed for T32 funding through the Institute for Immunology and Read More…

Congratulations to PhD student Mahina Mitul on publishing her very first, first-author paper! Mahina has done some excellent work to elucidate sex differences in human tissue immunity. Check out her paper, published in Frontiers in Immunology, here. Mahina also won the Excellent in Research Award from the Physiology & Biophysics department for her work. We are Read More…

‍Another exciting paper was published from the lab this month. Check it out in Cell Stem Cell. Co-first authors Jenna Kastenschmidt and Joe Schroers-Martin were able to create primary human follicular lymphomas and test immunotherapies in vitro. This was a great collaboration with the Alizadeh lab and we look forward to many more collaborations in the Read More…

We are wishing postdoc Jenna Kastenschmidt the very best as she moves to Basel, Switzerland for a Senior Scientist position at Roche. Way to go, we will miss you!