Robin Lee (left), Agustin Cruz (center), Rachel Gottschalk (right)

The American Association of Immunologists(AAI) awarded Drs. J. Agustin Cruz and Robin E.C. Lee the Intersect Fellowship 2020. Dr. Cruz holds a PhD in Immunology and has been working for the past two years as a postdoctoral associate with Dr. Lee to decode intracellular mechanisms of information transmission in response to changing extracellular environments. This AAI intersect fellowship aims to support Dr. Cruz’s postdoctoral training in computational biology while he studies the dynamics of immunological inflammatory signaling pathways in human-derived macrophages and cancer cell lines. This is a project in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Gottschalk from the Department of Immunology. In this new collaborative project, Dr. Cruz will dissect the physical and temporal features of key intermediate proteins of the nuclear-factor kappa-B (NF-KB) and the mitogen-activated kinase (MAPK) signaling pathways and relate the features of these pathways to cell fate decisions.