Speakers

Glendon was born and raised along the I-270 Maryland corridor and earned a B.S. in Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics from the great red-brick wilderness of the University of Maryland College Park. After his undergraduate studies, Glendon went on to work for MedImmune (now AstraZeneca) in Gaithersburg for 5.5 years before pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he worked with Dr. Craig Bassing to elucidate molecular mechanisms that contribute to T cell receptor allelic exclusion and genome stability. In the Chiu lab, Glendon is interested in studying the crosstalk between neurons and lymphocytes that ultimately shape adaptive immune responses. If/when he has free time, Glendon enjoys rock climbing, snowboarding, and avoiding writing in the third person.

Terri Laufer is a member of the Institute for Immunology and the Division of Rheumatology at Penn and at the VA.  She has a longstanding interest in the interactions between CD4+ T cells and antigen presenting cells that mediate development and differentiation of the T cells.  She is also interested in the biology of CD4+ T cells that contribute to autoimmunity. 

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Saar Gill obtained his medical degree from the University of Melbourne in Australia in 1999. He underwent internal medicine training at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, followed by haematology training at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which he completed in 2008. In 2008 he became a post-doctoral fellow at the laboratory of Robert Negrin at Stanford University, where he studied adoptive cellular therapy with NK cells. In 2011 Dr. Gill moved to the University of Pennsylvania where he did a BMT and Cellular Therapy fellowship under Dr David Porter, and started working in the laboratory with Dr. Michael Kalos on chimeric antigen receptor T cells for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In 2012 he became an  Instructor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology-Oncology at the Perelman School of Medicine. In 2013 the Translational group split from the Correlative Sciences group and became the Gill laboratory. The overarching goals of the Gill Laboratory are to produce effective and safe CAR T cells for the treatment of hematologic malignancies such as leukemia and lymphoma.