Erika PEARCE

Dr. Pearce obtained her Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology in 2005 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she studied the regulation of T cell responses during infection. It was during her postdoctoral studies, also at UPenn, where she began her research into how cellular metabolic processes govern immune cell differentiation and function. She launched her independent career in 2009, holding faculty positions at the Trudeau Institute in NY, and then as a tenured Associate Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She moved her research group to Europe in 2015 to become a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. In 2018 she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for her work on the role of metabolism in controlling immune responses, and the AAI-BD Investigator Award in 2020, for her early-career contributions to this field.
In 2021 she returned to the US and became a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Her work continues to investigate the connection between metabolic pathways and immune cell function, and how this impacts the role of the immune system in diseases such as infection, cancer, and autoimmunity.