Poholek Lab Alumni
Dr. Yibo Zheng
Tsinghua Scholar
Yibo joined the lab in 2022 as a Tsinghua scholar. He is from Shanghai and joined the lab in spring of 2022. He is an undergraduate student in the 4th year of his M.D. program in an 8 year curriculum. His project is on understanding Blimp-1 expression and function in type 2 innnate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) in the context of allergic asthma.
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He left the Poholek lab in 2025 to finish his medical training at Tsinghua University in China
Jiaqi (Jack) Lu
Research Technician
Jack joined the lab in 2021 as a research technician. He worked on assessing the regulation of enhancer elements of Blimp-1. He left the lab in 2023 to pursue another job.
Dr. Kun He
Research Scientist
Kun joined the lab in 2018 as a post-doctoral fellow. During his time, he worked to understand the role of Blimp-1 on on Th2 in allergie asthma. He focused on understanding how inhaled allergins promote tissue specific function of Blimp-1 in promoting Th2 cells in the in the lung. He used TCR transgenic mouse, spatial transcriptomic and CRISPR based strategies to assess the mechanism. He published two first author papers titled "Blimp-1 is essential for allergen-induced asthma and Th2 cell development in the lung" (2020) in J. Exp Med. and "Spatial microniches of IL-2 synergize with IL-10 to drive lung migratory Th2 cells in response to inhaled allergen" (2024) in Nature Immunology.
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He left the Poholek lab in 2024 to for a job in at the Center for Vaccine Development & Global Health as a Lab Lead. He currently works as a NIH/NAIAD Scientist at the RTB and Center for Human Immunology.
Dr. Rhodes Ford
PhD Student
Dr. Rhodes Ford joined the Poholek lab spring of 2018 as the first graduate student in the lab. During her time here, she drove the project in collaboration with the Delgoffe lab to investigate the epigenetic landscape of exhausted CD8+ T cells from tumors. Her work resulted in a publication in Science Immunology in 2022 titled "Tumor microenvironmental signals reshape chromatin landscapes to limit the functional potential of exhausted T cells". Further she published a review article in the Journal of Immunology titled "Regulation and Immunotherapeutic Targeting of the Epigenome in Exhausted CD8 T Cell Responses".
She left the lab for a postdoctoral position at UC San Francisco in the lab of Dr. Matthew Spitzer. She is currently a computational biologist at a stealth biotechnology company.
Abby Berrios
Undergraduate Researcher
Abby joined the lab in Fall of 2019 and graduated from the lab in Spring of 2022. Her project was on exploring potential cell type specific enhancers of Blimp-1 in T cells. She has gone on to be a research technician at Abound Bio.
Jinyi Zhang
Tsinghua Scholar
Jinyi came to the lab in August 2019 and worked on understanding the role of Blimp-1 transcription in ILC2 in the context of allergic asthma. She has gone on to continue her medical studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing China.
Angela Hettinga
Research Technician
Angela graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and joined the Poholek lab as a research technician in 2015. She left the lab in 2020 to pursue a nursing degree from the University of Pittsburgh and currently works as an ICU nurse.
Natalie Rittenhouse
Undergraduate/Post-Bac Researcher
Natalie joined the lab as a undergraduate researcher in 2016Â and transitioned to a post-bacc scholar after her graduation from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017. She left the lab in 2019 to pursue her PhD in genetics at UNC Chapel hill under the mentorship of Dr. Jill Dowen.
Elizabeth Schmitz
Undergraduate Researcher
Elizabeth joined the lab in 2017 as an undergraduate researcher from the University of Pittsburgh and graduated in 2020. She currently is pursing her post-bacc at the NIH/NIAMSD under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Ombrello.
Shivani Pandya
Undergraduate Researcher
Shivani joined the lab in 2017 as an undergraduate researcher and graduated from University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in bioinformatics in 2020. She left to become an analyst at Cigna.
Dave Tempestini
Undergraduate Researcher
Dave joined the lab in the Fall of 2020 as an undergraduate researcher and graduated with a B.S. in bioinformatics. He left the lab to become a software engineer at Vanguard.
Samantha Grimes
Undergraduate Researcher
Sam joined the lab in 2016 as an undergraduate researcher and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in microbiology. After the Poholek lab, she has gone on to pursue her PhD in IGP under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Dennison.