Organizers

Laura A. Vella MD, PhD, MSTR

Laura A. Vella MD, PhD, MSTR

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics

Dr. Laura Vella is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and an attending physician in pediatric infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Vella’s research program focuses on the use of peripheral blood to measure lymph node events, with an emphasis on T follicular helper cells, vaccine readiness in immunocompromised populations, and HIV infection. Her work has defined patterns of T follicular cell trafficking in the lymphatic system of humans and supports the notion that cells recently emigrated from lymphatic environments have greater potential to serve as a periscope into lymph node health and vaccine readiness.  

Norbert Pardi, PhD

Norbert Pardi, PhD

Assistant Professor of Microbiology

Dr. Norbert Pardi holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and genetics. He has been working at the University of Pennsylvania since 2011 and currently holds an Assistant Professor position at the Department of Microbiology of the Perelman School of Medicine. His research interest is the development of mRNA-based therapeutics with particular focus on new generation infectious disease vaccines. He explored the development of a novel vaccine platform using nucleoside-modified mRNA in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) and used it to generate highly effective vaccines targeting various pathogens (influenza virus, coronaviruses, malaria and others). Dr. Pardi is a pioneer of the nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine technology and published milestone papers in the field.