Jing Li, PhD
Please join UPMC Hillman Cancer Center in welcoming Jing Li, PhD, effective October 1, 2023. Dr. Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at UPMC Hillman.
Dr. Li will develop an active research program in Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy, which will include collaborative efforts with both basic research and clinical faculty across UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.
She is joining us from Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Mark Davis. Dr. Li’s research interest is regulatory CD8+ T cells. During her postdoc, in an article published in Science, she identified KIR+CD8+ T cells as a regulatory CD8+ T cell subset in humans and explored their role in maintaining peripheral tolerance in autoimmune and infectious diseases, explored the role of KIR+CD8+ T cells in human pregnancy, investigated the defects in immune tolerance and the antigenic drivers of pathogenic T cells during progression to type 1 diabetes, and studied systems immunology of influenza infection and vaccination in infants and adults.
Dr. Li has over 20 peer-reviewed publications and she currently serves as a guest associate editor in Frontiers in Immunology. She has one patent for the manipulation and use of antigen-specific regulatory T cells, and she has been awarded for her work with an AAI–Thermo Fisher Trainee Achievement Award and SITC Young Investigator Award.
She earned her PhD from the Institute for Immunology at Tsinghua University, China and before that was a research scholar working here at the University of Pittsburgh.
