Posted: October 1, 2021

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Parisa Kalantari, Assistant Professor of Immunology, to the department. We are very excited to be welcoming back one of our own! From Dr. Kalantari: I am very excited to join the Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences faculty. Penn State has always felt like home to me and coming back as a faculty member is a dream come true. As a PhD student, I got to work with incredible Professors and I am now delighted to see them become my colleagues and collaborators. As a faculty member, my goal is to create the same supportive environment for my own students. My research interests focus on innate immunity and infectious parasitic diseases. My work seeks to identify new targets and reveal novel immunological strategies for prevention and treatment of schistosomiasis and other Th17 cell-mediated diseases. I am currently studying the mechanisms of action of two pathways that protect the host from developing severe immunopathology. The first project focuses on the cGAS/STING pathway by defining the molecular basis underlying the anti-inflammatory bias imposed by STING, an adaptor molecule important in DNA sensing and type I Interferon production. The second project is to investigate the role of autophagy in suppressing immunopathology. Interested and motivated graduate and undergraduate students are encouraged to apply.