April 3, 2017

Zeb Zacharias, an Immunology Ph.D. student, has been awarded a $2000 Levitt Center Travel Award to present results from his thesis project at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Immunologists in Washington D.C. Zeb’s research in the laboratory of Dr. Kevin L. Legge is focused on delineating factors that control the magnitude of the T cell response during influenza virus infections. Zeb has recently identified a novel pathway through which FasL+ B cells within the draining lymph nodes kill influenza-specific CD8 T cells during high loads of influenza virus leading to an inhibition of T cell mediated immune protection. These finding may have important implications for understanding strains of influenza that exhibit a high degree of pathogenicity.