Principal Investigator
Kate Jeffrey | KJeffrey@mgh.harvard.edu
Dr. Kate L. Jeffrey is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, an Assistant in Immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital, Faculty of Harvard Immunology, Faculty of Harvard Virology and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. Kate grew up in Australia, performed her undergraduate studies (B.Sc, (Honors)) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and completed her Ph.D. in immunology with Professor Charles Mackay at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. She then worked as an Immunology editor with Nature Medicine in New York in 2007 before performing her postdoctoral research with Professor Sasha Tarakhovsky at The Rockefeller University in New York focusing on epigenomic regulation of innate immunity and inflammation. Kate is also co-founder of the New York Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City and is a proud mother of two daughters. She started her independent laboratory at MGH/Harvard in 2012.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Hajera Amatullah | hamatullah@mgh.harvard.edu
Hajera joined the lab in October 2016 as a postdoctoral fellow. Hajera received her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and Environmental Sciences from the University of Toronto, Canada followed by a Masters of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Her masters work with Dr. Jeremy A. Scott looked at the mechanisms underlying air pollution-induced cardiorespiratory dysfunction in naïve and asthmatic mouse models. She then completed her Ph.D. in Physiology at University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Claudia dos Santos and her primary work investigated the role of DJ-1/PARK7 in sepsis-induced multi organ failure. She additionally also investigated other novel therapeutic targets and cell therapies in sepsis and acute lung injury models. In the Jeffrey lab, Hajera is understanding the role of an immune-restricted epigenetic reader protein in homeostatic immunity and how its loss in IBD, CLL and MS contributes to disease. She is a recipient of a postdoc fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Outside of lab interests: Basketball, Baking and Comics
Raza Ur Rahman | rurahman@mgh.harvard.edu
Raza Joined the lab in September 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. Raza obtained his Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics from Muhammad Ali Jinnah University, Pakistan. He then went to Germany and obtained his Masters in Bioinformatics from Saarland University. In his master thesis with Prof. Jochen Wittbrodt in Heidelberg, Raza developed a pipeline to predict tissue specific gene expression based on promoter, enhancer and other genomic features using machine learning. Raza completed his PhD in Computer Science (Bioinformatics) from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany, followed by his first postdoc in the Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg, Germany. During his PhD and the first postdoc, Raza worked on the development of novel analysis and data integration systems to understand human gene regulation, such as he predicted pathology using machine learning from mutually exclusive exons. In another work, Raza found the role of several bacteria in diseases like dementia and schizophrenia. Additionally, he used machine learning models to predict Parkinson’s disease-specific blood biomarker (miRNAs) signature from sequencing data. In the Jeffrey lab, Raza is uncovering the pathogenic map of IBD using statistical machine learning methods.
Graduate Students
Isabella Fraschilla | IFRASCHILLA@mgh.harvard.edu
Isabella grew up in Georgia and completed a B.S. in Biology in 2014 at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. After her undergraduate studies, she went on to study humoral immunity as a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD and then the Ragon Institute in Cambridge, MA. She is currently a student in the Ph.D. program in Immunology at Harvard University. Since joining the Jeffrey lab in the fall of 2017, she has been interested in how epigenetic reader proteins can regulate transcriptional programs of immune cells in health and disease.
Outside of lab, Isabella enjoys the outdoors, cooking, and learning Italian.
Alumni
Fatemeh Adiliaghdam | Postdoctoral fellow (2016 – 2021)
Fatemeh joined the lab in August 2016 as a postdoctoral fellow. Fatemeh obtained her MD from Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran, followed by a Master of Public Health at the same university. In the Jeffrey lab, she examined host antiviral responses to both pathogenic and symbiotic viruses. Fatemeh is currently completing her surgical residency.
Sreehaas Digumarthi | Undergraduate student (2014-2019)
Sreehaas joined the Jeffrey Lab as a high school student during his senior year at the Belmont Hill School in 2014 and stayed on between classes and during his summers until he graduated from Northeastern University in 2019. Sreehaas is currently a Research Technician in the lab of David Artis at Weill Cornell in New York. We miss seeing Sreehaas’ amazing sneakers every day in the lab.
Tahnee Saunders | Research Technician II (2015-2017)
Tahnee is currently a Ph.D. student in Professor Benjamin Kile’s lab at Monash University in Melbourne under an Australian Postgraduate Award (Australian Research Council).
Stuti Mehta | Postdoctoral Fellow (2013-2016)
Stuti is is currently a postdoc in Stuart Orkin’s lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.
D. Alex Cronkite | Research Technician (2013-2016)
Alex is currently in the M.D. program at the University of Central Florida.
Megha Basavappa | Research Technician (2012-2015)
Megha is currently in the Ph.D. program at U Penn Immunology
Tim Prior | Research Technician (2014-2015)
Tim is currently in the M.D./Ph.D. program at Tulane University
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