TICK IMMUNITY

OUR TEAM

The assembled team of project leaders represents a highly collaborative group of investigators who have worked together for the past two decades on various aspects of tick-borne infection research. Each Principal Investigator or PI brings specific expertise to the Research Projects and Technical or Administrative Core. Our team encompasses substantial expertise in entomology, microbiology, immunology, and infectious diseases.

Fikrig is the Waldemar von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale University School of Medicine. He is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Section Chief of the Section of Infectious Diseases within the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale. He is leading Project 3 as one of the most successful, productive, and senior leaders in vector-borne diseases and is internationally recognized for his seminal contributions in advancing the research involving tick-borne infections. His initial scientific studies contributed to the development of the first ever FDA-approved human Lyme disease vaccine. He has authored more than 330 research articles, including writing reviews and book chapters, and has led a number of pivotal discoveries in infectious diseases, particularly in tick-bone infections including Lyme disease, human granulocytic anaplasmosis, and West Nile virus. He is the recipient of many awards including an NIH Merit award and has continually been funded by major extramural sources including the NIH and the HHMI since the early 1990s. Read more

Pedra is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His research directed towards understanding the molecular and cellular events that enable host and arthropod vector immunity and breakthrough research make him ideal to lead Project 2. His laboratory uses modern techniques available in biochemistry, molecular, structural, and systems biology to comprehend fundamental interactions between the arthropod vector, the pathogen, and the mammalian host. He led the annotation of immune genes for the Ixodes scapularis genome project, and also spearheaded a study group to tackle the problem of genetic manipulation of obligate intracellular bacteria. His scientific contributions are related to the demonstration of anti-inflammatory properties of vector saliva on Toll-like and Nod-like receptor signaling pathways during pathogen colonization of the mammalian host. He also discovered that eicosanoids regulate an atypical NLRC4 inflammasome pathway upon rickettsial infection and determined the existence of a novel IMD circuit in the tick arthropod vector. He has been federally funded to study tick-borne diseases since 2007 and has published approximately 50 peer-reviewed articles. Read more

Munderloh is a Professor in the Department of Entomology at UMN. Her many seminal discoveries regarding the cellular and molecular interactions between ticks and their associated pathogens and her capacity to disseminate research tools such as tick cell lines and microbial isolates to other researchers in the field, she is directing the Tick Resources Core. She and her colleagues have established a large number of cell lines from ticks of medical and veterinary importance, including Ixodes scapularis that are widely used by laboratories across the globe. Her group has used these cell lines to isolate several species of human and animal obligate intracellular tick-borne pathogens and symbionts, including Anaplasma phagocytophilum and the Ixodes scapularis symbiont, Rickettsia buchneri, sequenced and annotated their genomes, and analyzed their transcriptome during tick cell infection. Additionally, her lab contributed 22 of 30 Rickettsiales species for sequencing in the “Rickettsiales Genomes” project, and supplied 10 of the 14 isolates deposited in BEI. She has published more than 100 research articles and has been continuously funded by the NIH since the late 1990s. Read more