Rachel Rutishauser, MD, PhD

Dr. Rutishauser is an Infectious Disease-trained physician-scientist and Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Experimental Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her MD and PhD degrees from Yale University where she studied the regulation of virus-specific effector and memory CD8+ T cell differentiation in mice with Dr. Susan Kaech. At UCSF, she completed her post-doctoral studies with Drs. Mike McCune and Peter Hunt, and established her independent laboratory in November, 2020. The Rutishauser laboratory uses high-dimensional single cell profiling and functional genomics approaches to understand the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of HIV-specific CD8+ T cell function at the basic mechanistic level and in the context of HIV cure studies, including therapeutic vaccination and CAR-T cell therapy. The laboratory also studies the molecular basis for and clinical implications of altered CD8+ T cell effector differentiation in early human development and applies systems immunology approaches to identify pathways correlated with immunologic protection in people after infection and vaccination.