News

August 2024
Wow, it has been a busy summer. New postdoc Dr. Katrina Evans joined the lab to work on novel vaccine formulations and understanding how and why they work via mechanistic work in immune organoids. Congratulations to PhD students Mahina Mitul and Erika Joloya who successfully competed for T32 funding through the Institute for Immunology and Virology programs respectively.

May 2024
‍We are welcoming several new folks to the lab! Welcome to Evien Cheng, Gargee Bhattacharya, and Arjun Nair for undergraduate, postdoc, and graduate studies respectively!

May 2024
‍Congratulations to PhD student Mahina Mitul on publishing her very first, first-author paper! Mahina has done some excellent work to elucidate sex differences in human tissue immunity. Check out her paper, published in Frontiers in Immunology, here. Mahina also won the Excellent in Research Award from the Physiology & Biophysics department for her work.

March 2024
‍Another exciting paper was published from the lab this month. Check it out in Cell Stem Cell. Co-first authors Jenna Kastenschmidt and Joe Schroers-Martin were able to create primary human follicular lymphomas and test immunotherapies in vitro. This was a great collaboration with the Alizadeh lab and we look forward to many more collaborations in the future!

October 2023
We are wishing postdoc Jenna Kastenschmidt the very best as she moves to Basel, Switzerland for a Senior Scientist position at Roche. Way to go, we will miss you!

July 2023
The very first paper from the Wagar lab was published in Immunity on July 20th! Time to celebrate! Check out the amazing paper from first-author Jenna Kastenschmidt (and several Wagar lab co-authors) here. Based on this work, Jenna established a new working model of how vaccine format influences the magnitude and quality of the influenza responses.

June 2023
Congratulations to Kyle for completing his Bachelors degree in Computer Science! We're also celebrating the kickoff of the Wagar lab's first R01 grant, which will focus on identifying host factors that affect the immune response to flu.

May 2023
Welcome to Erika Joloya, who is officially joining us for her graduate studies after a successful spring rotation!
‍

December 2022
Congratulations to Zach for winning second prize for his poster at UCI's Institute for Immunology annual symposium!

December 2022
Lisa, Suhas, Zach, and Jenna traveled to Boston for a Wellcome Leap HOPE program meeting. It was a fantastic meeting - very exciting to see the incredible progress from several labs and lots of fun to catch up with friends and collaborators.

October 2022
Congratulations to postdocs Jenna Kastenschmidt and Suhas Sureshchandra for receiving Society of Leukocyte Biology trainee travel awards! They did a great job representing the lab at the annual meeting in Hawaii. We also celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving at Lisa's house - how the lab and families have grown over the past year!

September 2022
The Wagar lab welcomes a flurry of trainees to the lab for the new academic year. A warm welcome to David Bojorquez (CMB rotation student), Kyle Batucal (Bio199 CS student), and Tim Yates (bioinformatics programmer).
‍
‍

August 2022
Congratulations to grad student Mahina Mitul on advancing to PhD candidacy. We're so proud of you Mahina, you nailed it!

‍

August 2022
We're excited to kickoff a new NIAID-funded project in collaboration with the rest of the UCI Vaccine R&D Center! The project will focus on characterizing and understanding mechanisms of action underlying vaccine adjuvants. The Wagar lab will contribute to the data management and integrated multi-omics analysis efforts.

‍

June 2022
Congratulations to (now alum) Aviv Benchorin for graduating! Aviv completed his BSc in Computer Science. We're grateful for Aviv's contributions to the lab (thoughtful analysis strategies for datasets of epic proportions) that culminated in a successful honors thesis project.