Hannah Meyer

CSHL Fellow
Cancer Center Member

Ph.D., University of Cambridge, EMBL-EBI, 2018

hmeyer@cshl.edu | (516) 367 - 8468

A properly functioning immune system must be able to recognize diseased cells and foreign invaders among the multitude of healthy cells in the body. This ability is essential to both prevent autoimmune diseases and fight infections and cancer. We study how a specific type of immune cells, known as T cells, are educated to make this distinction during development.

The thymus generates and selects a highly variable yet specific T cell repertoire which discriminates between healthy and non-healthy self and dangerous non-self antigens. My research group uses a systems immunology approach to dissect the mechanisms crucial to the selection processes in the thymus. We develop experimental techniques and combine the resulting data with innovative computational models to generate accurate and testable hypotheses about tissue-level organ physiology.

Studying thymus physiology from a qualitative and quantitative perspective will provide us with a more fine-grained understanding of the selection processes and their down-stream consequences such as auto-immunity, cancer immunosurveillance and immune deficiency.