Dr. Bramson is a world leading researcher in cancer immunology and immunotherapy. He has pioneered the treatment of cancer by integrating gene therapy, adoptive cell-based therapy and oncolytic viruses. His group has also spearheaded large-scale transcriptional analysis of the tumor microenvironment to predict therapeutic outcomes in animal models and cancer patients. He is currently the principal investigator of 9 research grants centered around cancer biology and immunotherapy.

Dr. Bramson has authored many highly cited articles in leading journals of cancer immunology, hematology, infectious disease and gene therapy, and won numerous scientific awards. He is on the editorial board of Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy, and is the Canadian Research Chair in Translational Cancer Immunology and a member of the steering committee of Canadian Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium.

Dr. Cantor is a world-renowned immunologist who has made important contributions to understanding the development and function of T lymphocytes and Natural Killer (NK) cells. His early studies indicated that the thymus gave rise to two major lineages of T cells that recognized the MHC class-II and class-I molecules and were equipped to mediate distinct immunological functions before overt encounter with antigen. His laboratory continues to investigate the molecular and cellular elements that regulate the immune response and maintain self-tolerance.

Dr. Cantor has authored a large number of landmark articles in journals including Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, Immunity and Journal of Experimental Medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Way is a world’s leading physician-scientist specializing in prenatal infection and maternal-fetal immunology. He has made seminal contributions on the molecular-cellular mechanisms responsible for maternal-fetal immunological tolerance, fetal injury after prenatal infection, and infection susceptibility during pregnancy and in newborn infants. His research has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of pregnancy complications and susceptibility to infection in newborns.

He has published many articles in Nature, Cell, Nature Immunology, Immunity, Cell Host & Microbe and Journal of Clinical Investigation and won numerous prestigious awards for his groundbreaking discoveries.

Dr. Fulton trained in microbiology and cancer immunology at University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of British Columbia. She was the Chief of the Laboratory of Immunology at Michigan Cancer Foundation, now Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Center before moving to the University of Maryland. She now leads the Hormone Responsive Cancer Program at University of Maryland Cancer Center and performs cutting-edge basic and clinical research to develop innovative approaches to diagnose, treat and prevent breast and prostate cancer. Her research centers on dissecting the role of inflammatory pathways in the promotion of cancer progression.

Dr. Fulton has published many studies in leading journals, such as Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Nature Communications and Cancer Research.

Dr. Zhao is a leading expert in the epigenetic regulation of cell differentiation and cell memory. His laboratory developed the ChIP-SAGE, ChIP-Seq and MNase-Seq techniques. By applying these cutting-edge techniques, they reported the first histone methylome (Barski et al., Cell 2007), the first acetylome (Wang et al., Nature Genetics 2008) and the first genome-wide nucleosome maps (Schones et al., Cell 2008) of human cells.

Dr. Zhao's group also found that histone deacetylases (HDACs), the previously known co-repressors of transcription, are highly enriched in active genes; at the same time, histone acetylases (HATs) co-bind with HDACs to inactive genes to prepare them for future activation in response to environmental stimuli (Wang et al., Cell 2009). Their characterization of T cell epigenomes revealed that the active H3K4me3 and repressive H3K27me3 modifications are co-localized at key transcription factor genes and potentiate them for activation during lineage commitment and trans-differentiation of different T cell lineages (Roh et al., PNAS 2006, Wei et al., Immunity 2009). Using ChIA-PET, they have identified genome-wide enhancer-promoter interactions in human T cells (Chepelev et al., Cell Res. 2012) and found a critical role of cohesin-mediated domains in insulating important genes from non-specific activities of regulatory elements outside of the domains (Dowen et al., Cell, 2014). Using mouse ES cells, they demonstrated that histone variant H2A.Z functions to maintain an open chromatin structure at enhancers and facilitates targeting of both the active and repressive complexes (Hu et al., Cell stem Cell 2012).

More recently, they developed the scDNase-seq technique for analysis of genome-wide DNase I hypersensitive sites in single-cells and a very small number of patient cells recovered from FFPE tissue slides (Nature 2015). They demonstrated that the cell-to-cell variation of chromatin accessibility is correlated to the variation in single-cell gene expression.

Dr. Li is a T cell biologist by training. His early studies focused on mechanisms that determine antigen recognition and TCR sensitivity. He performed ground-breaking studies on microRNA miR-181a as a regulator of TCR signaling and a “rheostat” of T cell sensitivity throughout development and antigen responses. Currently, the major objective of Li laboratory is to discover new immune regulatory mechanisms and to employ them to modulate the strength and pattern of T cell responses for clinical intervention, especially, for cancer therapies. As of today, Dr. Li has been constructing research programs by developing new technological platforms, fostering collaborations to acquire expertise in various disciplines, and focusing on the translational value of his mechanistic studies:

(I) programs to discover non-invasive biomarkers. Li lab has demonstrated that cellular and serum miRNAs are valuable biomarkers for various disease diagnosis and prognosis. In addition, aided by the next generation sequencing and other modern technology, Li lab is performing immune monitoring to validate the efficacy of a series of immune therapies at the pre-clinical and clinical stages;

(II) programs to identify entities/targets for immunotherapy. By elucidating the roles of specific miRNAs in T cell differentiation, effector function and tumor-immune crosstalk, Li laboratory has unveiled multiple miRNA targets for immune-modulation and cancer immunotherapy;

(III) programs to utilize miRNAs as tools for discovery of novel epigenetic regulators that control T cell lineage commitment and plasticity. By studying the interplay between miRNAs and the epigenetic machinery, Li laboratory has uncovered signaling nodes and protein functions that play previously-unappreciated roles in T cell fate decisions.