Erika L. Pearce is an American immunologist. She is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

after serving as director and a scientific member at Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. Her work investigates the connection between metabolism and immune cell function with a particular focus on the regulation of T-cells. In 2018, she was awarded the Leibniz Prize for her "outstanding work in metabolism and inflammation research."

Early life and education

Pearce was born in 1972, and grew up in North Fork, Long Island, New York. She completed her

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

degree at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

in 1998 and earned her PhD in cell and molecular biology from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in 2005. While completing her postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Pearce began her research into how cellular metabolic processes govern immune responses to infection and cancer.

Career

Upon completing her postdoctoral studies, Pearce joined the Trudeau Institute in New York City from 2009 until 2011. She left the non-profit in 2011 to become an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) in St. Louis. During her tenure at WUSM, Pearce expanded on her earlier research into memory T cells. In 2012, her research team found that the production of additional mitochondria is triggered by

interleukin-15 Interleukin-15 (IL-15) is a cytokine with structural similarity to Interleukin-2 (IL-2). Like IL-2, IL-15 binds to and signals through a complex composed of IL-2/IL-15 receptor beta chain (CD122) and the common gamma chain (gamma-C, CD132). IL- ...

. She also found that genetically manipulating T cell's mitochondria could cause a higher percentage of undifferentiated T cells to become memory cells. Pearce and her colleagues also found evidence that suggested cancer cells could disable T cells ability to fight off tumors and some kinds of infection. Her research team found that withholding sugar from T cells, the cells no longer produced

interferon gamma Interferon gamma (IFN-γ) is a dimerized soluble cytokine that is the only member of the type II class of interferons. The existence of this interferon, which early in its history was known as immune interferon, was described by E. F. Wheelock ...

. In March 2014, Pearce was promoted to the rank of

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. Overview In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a ...

of pathology and immunology at WUSM. In her new role, Pearce received two grants to assist her research into cellular metabolism in immunity to infection. She received a grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the

National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...

of the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

. Pearce left North America in September 2015 to become the director and a scientific member at Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. In 2018, she was awarded the Leibniz Prize for her "outstanding work in metabolism and inflammation research." Pearce returned to the United States in 2022 to become the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at

Publications

, Pearce has more than 18,000 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 49.

Highly cited articles (''more than 1000 citations'')

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References

External links