Monthly Seminar Series

Catherine Blish, MD, PhD is the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She has a joint appointment in the Stanford Immunology Program, is the Associate Dean for Basic and Translational Research, the Co-Director of the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program, and an Investigator of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. As an undergraduate she studied Biochemistry at the University of California, Davis, before completing her MD and PhD in Immunology at the University of Washington, followed by residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship training in Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington. Her research is dedicated to learning how to harness the immune system to prevent and cure diseases. Her lab studies host-pathogen interactions, with a particular focus on innate immune responses to a diverse array of pathogens including HIV, dengue virus, influenza, tuberculosis, and SARS-CoV-2. She divides her time between research, clinical practice in infectious diseases, teaching, and her administrative roles.

Julia Prigann has a background in Biochemistry and obtained her PhD from the Charité University Medicine in Berlin Germany, where she studied how innate immunity can be used to target HIV-1-infected cells. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow working with Melanie Ott at the Gladstone Institute of Virology where she continues to study host/pathogen interactions in HIV persistence with the aim to develop novel therapeutics.