Inci Yildirim is the John F. Enders Professor of Pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine, where she has taught for the past six years. Dr. Yildirium, who holds a secondary appointment in the Yale School of Public Health, currently serves as chief of the section of infectious diseases and global health, founding director of the Yale Pediatric Vaccine Trials Program, and founding director of the Yale New Haven Health Children’s Hospital Transplant Infectious Diseases Program. An expert in pediatric vaccinology and infectious diseases, she studies the burden of infectious diseases and innate and adaptive immune signatures of vaccine responses in vulnerable populations.
Dr. Yildirim earned her medical degree from the Hacettepe University School of Medicine in Türkiye and completed her residency at Yale School of Medicine. She received a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Boston University.
Deborah J. Lenschow has been named the inaugural John S. Daniels Professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. A physician-scientist in the fields of immunology, rheumatology, and medicine, Dr. Lenschow is a professor of medicine, molecular microbiology, and pathology and immunology. She also serves as director of WashU’s Oliver Langenberg Physician-Scientist Training Program. Her research focuses on how type I interferons — immune proteins that help fight viral infections — interact with viruses and how abnormal interferon responses can contribute to autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Lenschow is a graduate of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she majored in biology. After earning both her medical degree and Ph.D. through a joint program at the University of Chicago, she completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in rheumatology at Washington University.
Katerina Akassoglou was named the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Constellation Chair in the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine, a joint initiative between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Dr. Akassoglou comes to her new role from Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco, where she served as a professor of neurology and director of the Gladstone-UCSF Center for Neurovascular Brain Immunology. She is known for her research on how interactions among the brain, blood vessels, and immune system influence brain health and disease.
Dr. Akassoglou earned her bachelor’s degree in biology and her Ph.D. in neuroimmunology from the University of Athens in Greece. She completed postdoctoral training in neurovascular biology at Rockefeller University in New York City, as well as additional training in neuroscience at New York University.