麻豆传媒

Shane Crotty, Ph.D., and his team study immunity against infectious diseases. They investigate how the immune system remembers infections and vaccines. By remembering infections and vaccines, the body is protected from becoming infected in the future. Vaccines are one of the most cost-effective medical treatments in modern civilization and are responsible for saving millions of lives. Yet, good vaccines are very difficult to design, and very few new vaccines have been made in the past 10 years. A better understanding of immune memory will facilitate the ability to make new vaccines. Dr. Tony Fauci, NIH, referred to some of the Crotty lab work as “exceedingly important to the field of immunogen design.”
Dr. Crotty is a member of the LJI Coronavirus Task Force. The Crotty Lab, in close collaboration with the lab of LJI Professor Alessandro Sette, Dr. Biol. Sci., was the first to publish a detailed analysis of the immune system’s response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 (). The made a number of important findings. Most importantly, it showed that the immune system activates all three major branches of “adaptive immunity” (which learns to recognize specific viruses) to try to fight the virus: CD4 “helper” T cells , CD8 “killer” T cells, and antibodies. The LJI team found good immune responses to multiple different parts of SARS-CoV-2 (imagine the virus is made out of legos, and the immune system can recognize different individual legos), including the Spike protein, which is the main target of almost all COVID-19 vaccine efforts.
Dr. Crotty has a major focus studying human immune responses to vaccines. His lab is hard at work on candidate HIV vaccines with the CHAVID consortium. His lab is also hard at work on vaccine strategies for influenza, strep throat, and COVID-19. The Crotty lab studies new vaccine ideas and strategies that may be applicable to many diseases, based on a fundamental understanding of the underlying immune responses, and how the cells of the immune system interact. 
Dr. Crotty regularly does media outreach on vaccines and immunity to infectious diseases. Dr. Crotty is also the author of Ahead of the Curve, a biography of Nobel laureate scientist David Baltimore, published in 2001, and reviewed in The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He earned his B.S. in Biology and Writing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology/Virology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2001.

Landon Westfall, Ph.D., is a bacteriologist, virologist, immunologist and molecular biologist with 15 years of experience in researching medically-relevant pathogens at both pre-clinical and clinical levels. As associate director of Influenza, he is responsible for overseeing the influenza virology program, both in vitro and in vivo, at Southern Research. He leads the support effort for pre-clinical studies and clinical sample testing by designing and executing validations or qualifications for immunogenicity assays, and managing sample analysis in partnership with both commercial and government clients. In addition, Westfall has experience conducting GLP regulated general safety toxicology studies for newly discovered influenza vaccines in support of regulatory submissions to the FDA.

Prior to joining Southern Research in 2015, Westfall was principal investigator and study director at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, a BSL3+/ABSL3+ contract research organization, where he successfully conducted a GLP-compliant animal model qualification for an aerosolized Tier-1 Select Agent in nonhuman primates. He supervised and performed a broad range of procedures using novel and standard techniques and methods, including refining a number of animal models using both viral and bacterial species. Viral animal models were primarily mouse and ferret influenza models using seasonal, pandemic and highly pathogenic avian influenza strains. Influenza studies included testing new vaccine platforms and antivirals for efficacy on newly emerged and pandemic influenza strains.

Westfall is a member of the American Society of Microbiology. He earned his doctorate in medical microbiology from Texas Tech University (TTU) Health Sciences Center and his Bachelor of Science in biology from TTU.

, is a professor of clinical medicine in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California, San Diego. She sees patients in the Owen Clinic and the infectious diseases clinic. She also cares for people during hospital stays.
Dr. Torriani is medical director of the UC San Diego Infection Prevention and Clinical Epidemiology and the tuberculosis control units at UC San Diego Health. In collaboration with Atlas Public Health, she has been instrumental in creating an extensive electronic microbiology surveillance and pharmacy utilization program called Guardian that allows for internal data mining, surveillance, unit-specific antibiogram production, and external reporting of contagious infections to San Diego Public Health and to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) of Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI).
Since 2010, Dr. Torriani has served on the Metrics Group for CA HAI Reporting, an independent group of experts discussing best standards and methods for HAI reporting in California. 
She is fluent in five languages: Italian, French, German, Spanish and English.

Professor Runstadler joined the Department of Infectious Disease & Global Health in 2017. Working at the host-pathogen-environmental interface, the Runstadler laboratory studies how emerging virus, specifically influenza, is maintained, transmitted and evolves in reservoir or intermediate animal hosts. A major part of this work is directed at understanding how both host and viral factors may influence the risk of viral spillover into new hosts, including humans. Dr. Runstadler is working with collaborators to bridge the gap between studies of disease surveillance and disease ecology with a molecular and comparative understanding of pathogenesis, immune response and evolution. His current research is particularly focused on understanding genotype-phenotype relationships of the influenza virus, the role of diverse hosts and environments, and the interspecies movement of virus to the emergence of disease in new populations.
Prior to joining the faculty at the Cummings School, Dr. Runstadler was a faculty member at both the University of Alaska Fairbanks with the Institute of Arctic Biology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Division of Comparative Medicine. Dr. Runstadler received an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his DVM and PhD in Genetics from the University of California, Davis. Prior to beginning his own lab at UAF, Dr. Runstadler was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Companion Animal Health under Dr. Neils Pedersen at the University of California, Davis.