My academic career began at the University of Northern Iowa, where I became fascinated with how cells of the immune system could identify and eliminate specific threats. Through my PhD in immunology at Stanford University and postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, I focused this interest on how cell metabolism affected two sides of the same coin—autoimmunity and anti-tumor immunity. In the former instance, the clinical goal is to prevent immune cell function against oneself, and in the latter, the clinical goal is to augment this response.

My first faculty position was at Duke University, where I joined the Departments of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and of Immunology. In 2015, I was named the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Immunobiology in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology at Vanderbilt University, and had the privilege of serving as the founding Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Immunobiology. More recently, in 2025, I returned to the University of Chicago where I was appointed the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Chair Professor for Cancer Research. I now serve as the Chair of the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and Co-director of the Ludwig Center at the University of Chicago.

My lab’s work has focused on the fields of immunometabolism and cancer metabolism. Early in my independent career, I demonstrated that T lymphocyte metabolism is dynamically regulated and is critical for controlling the immune response. Our group was the first to show that each T cell subset adopts a specific metabolic program, which helped develop the new field of immunometabolism. We also found that these same metabolic pathways are often altered in cancer, which became another important area of my research. These metabolic changes and differential regulatory patterns reveal mechanisms of disease and now offer new therapeutic targets to modulate immune cell function in both cancer and immune-related diseases. We now work to understand basic mechanisms in the field of immunometabolism and how the tumor microenvironment and obesity shape the ability of immune cells to eliminate tumors.

While at Vanderbilt, I was twice recognized with the Charles Randell Prize Faculty Teaching Award. I am also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and have been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher. I have been named a scholar of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the Bernard Osher Fellow of the American Asthma Foundation, and a William Paul Distinguished Innovator of the Lupus Research Alliance. I was also elected as an Honorary member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and received the Fred W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology from the Cancer Research Institute.