Jiang Lab
Ning Jenny Jiang, Ph.D.
Peter & Geri Skirkanich Associate Professor of Innovation
Dr. Jiang is Peter and Geri Skirkanich Associate Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering. She obtained her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology and did her postdoc training at Stanford University. Dr. Jiang’s lab focuses on systems immunology and immune engineering by developing technologies that enable the direct profiling of human immune systems in cancer, infection, and vaccination. Dr. Jiang is a recipient of the prestigious Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration award. She is one of the ten National Academy of Medicine 2019 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholars and was recently recognized as one of the six 2021 Cancer Research Institute Lloyd J. Old STAR awardees. She is a fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
RESEARCH INTEREST
My lab focuses on using a systems biology approach to study immunology. A dysfunctional or dysregulated immune system not only fails to offer protection, it can also introduce unnecessary immune responses such as allergies or autoimmune diseases. The key to immune modulation and engineering and regenerative medicine is to understand how the normal immune system works. However, a full understanding of the complex interactions among immune cells and between immune cells and cytokines and chemokines requires a quantitative and systems approach.
At the heart of the adaptive immune system, T cells and B cells need to respond to pathogenic antigen stimulation by changing their cellular programs to cell activation. However, at the end of an infection, a few of these responding cells put on a different cellular program to become long-term memory cells. How do cells make these choices and how external stimulations impact on these cellular program changes are fundamental questions to the understanding of the adaptive immune systems and to engineering immunity. Over the years, we have developed a suite of tools from characterizing biophysical interactions of antigen receptors and their cognate ligands to multi-dimensional profiling single T cells linking their antigen specificity to their transcriptome profiles. These tools are instrumental in our quest to the understanding of T and B cell fate choice and cellular programing in different disease settings, including cancer.