Speaker

Karin Pelka, PhD, is an Assistant Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, UCSF. Her lab is also part of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Network. Karin aims to understand how immunological processes are regulated in human tissues in order to leverage the immune system in the fight against diseases such as cancer. Using unbiased high-throughput and high-content technologies and deeply mechanistic studies, she intends to systematically dissect how immune and non-immune cells work together to shape immune responses. She obtained her PhD from the Institute of Innate Immunity, University of Bonn in Germany. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, she shifted her interest to cancer immunology and systems biology. She led a cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional scRNA-seq and spatial profiling effort on human colorectal cancer and discovered that these seemingly heterogeneous tumors contained several conserved and spatially-organized multicellular interaction networks between malignant cells and immune cells. Karin was a scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, a fellow of the German Research Foundation, and a BroadIgnite Awardee. She is also the recipient of the inaugural Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) Peggy Prescott Early Career Scientist Award in Colorectal Cancer Research and a SU2C Phillip A. Sharp Innovation in Collaboration Award.

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