Hosted by the School of Medicine at Cardiff University

Prof. Lieberman will discuss inflammatory cell death triggered when intracellular sensors detect pathogens or sterile signs of cellular danger and how it contributes to disease.

Register for your free place on Eventbrite

Judy Lieberman holds an Endowed Chair in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and is Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She graduated from Radcliffe College, Harvard, received a PhD in theoretical physics at Rockefeller and an MD in the joint Harvard MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Before medical school, she was a high energy theoretical physicist, member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and researcher at Fermilab studying elementary particles, quantum field theory and general relativity. She was a postdoc with Herman Eisen in the Cancer Center at MIT and trained in internal medicine and hematology and worked as a hematologist/oncologist at New England Medical Center. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Her lab studies the innate and adaptive immune response to infection and cancer. They described the mechanisms used by killer lymphocytes (cytotoxic T cells and NK) to destroy cells targeted for immune elimination and protect us from infection and cancer. She also uncovered novel mechanisms by which killer lymphocytes kill microbial pathogens. She was the first to describe T cell exhaustion in humansand to test antigen-specific T cell therapy. More recently she uncovered the molecular basis for inflammatory death (pyroptosis), which lies at the root of inflammation, sepsis and cytokine release syndrome. Recent work identified important roles for pyroptosis in SARS-CoV-2, Yersinia, and Group A streptococcal infections, in immune control of cancer and in neurodegeneration. She also identified an inhibitor of pyroptosis. She was the first to show that small interfering RNAs could be used as drugsand to develop methods of cell-targeted RNA delivery. Her laboratory is currently investigating the use of aptamer-linked siRNAs for cancer therapy. They also uncovered roles of microRNAs and lncRNAs in regulating cancer.