Congratulations to Michelle Loui for winning a Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center predoctoral fellowship! This award will partially support her studies.

The lab headed to Big Bear Lake for a weekend retreat. In addition to fun, they discussed goals for the coming year.

Cyrillus successfully defended his thesis on the computational analysis of antibody Fc mixtures. Dr. Tan will be moving start a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University in the lab of Rahul Satija.

Congratulations to recent Ph.D. recipient Brian Orcutt-Jahns on winning the bioengineering department’s Outstanding Ph.D. award.

Brian successfully defended his thesis on computationally-guided engineering of cell-selective cytokines. Dr. Orcutt-Jahns will be moving to San Fransisco to start a postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech, with joint appointments in Cancer Immunology and Biomedical Research AI Development.

The Meyer lab has received a new grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This project, working with several other labs at UCLA, will study the durability of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in kidney transplant recipients. The Meyer lab will lead the integration of the collected data to find how interactions across the immune system are disrupted by immunosuppressive drugs. Doing so will help to identify how this dysregulation can be corrected to improve responses to vaccination in this and other at-risk populations.

The Meyer lab has received a new grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This project, working with several other labs at UCLA, will study Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans. Both of these organisms are commonly found on healthy individuals without causing problems, but occasionally lead to deadly infections. The Meyer lab will lead the development of new computational algorithms for pattern matching across datasets, to identify commonalities across different types of measurements and between both types of infections. Doing so will improve our ability to predict the outcome of infection and our understanding of how these infections become life-threatening.

Dr. Meyer was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

Farnaz successfully defended her thesis on dissecting the heterogeneity in and cell cycle contribution of cancer therapy. Dr. Mohammadi will be moving to San Fransisco to start a postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech.

Marc successfully defended his thesis on dissecting AXL-mediated resistance to EGFR-targeted therapies in lung cancer. Dr. Creixell will be moving to San Fransisco to start as a scientist at Calico.

The lab has established an agreement with Merck to profile antibody effector responses across several dimensions. This work should provide a high resolution view of the different design variables that contribute to cell-directed immunity. The approach is modeled by work from the lab to study other receptor families.

Congratulations to Andrew for winning a UCLA EDI Student Leadership Award! This is a campus-wide award recognizing UCLA students who have exhibited exceptional leadership aligning with and contributing to UCLA’s EDI mission and priorities.

Dr. Meyer was recently recognized with an Emerging Leader Award from the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research. This award includes three years of funding for the lab to develop a plaform to analyze the properties of endogenous anti-tumor antibodies.