Next week's IIG seminar speaker is Dr Jonathan Powell. He is currently an Associate Professor of Oncology and Pharmacology in the Division of Immunology and Hematopoiesis at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore MD. Jonathan obtained his M.D./PhD. in 1992 from Emory University where he worked in the laboratory of Dr Aftab Ansari on the CD8 T cell immunogenicity of SIV proteins in rhesus macaques. He then did his residency in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and a Hematology-Oncology Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. In 1996 he came to the NIH for a postdoctoral Fellowship in the Laboratory of Dr. Ron Schwartz. While at NIH, he worked on several molecular mechanisms involved in CD4 T cell anergy including his important discovery that rapamycin allows T cell anergy to develop even in the presence of costimulation, a finding that he and John Tisdale eventually applied in the clinic to facilitate the establishment of bone marrow chimerism. Jonathan moved to Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor in the Oncology and Pharmacology Departments in 2001. There he continued to work on peripheral tolerance mechanisms, publishing an important paper in Immunity on the role of Egr 2 and 3 as negative regulators of T cell activation and a paper in Blood on the role of the A2A adenosine receptor in the induction of T cell anergy and iTregs. His most recent work has focused on the role of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) as a master regulator in determining T cell fate and it is this topic that he will present in his seminar to us. Jonathan is a very clear and engaging speaker, and this is a talk I am sure you won't want to miss.

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/pharmacology/research/powell.html

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