Welcome to the Pepper Lab

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The adaptive immune system is characterized by specificity, functional diversity, and memory. These characteristics endow the body with the ability to mount a directed response against an individual pathogen for many years after vaccination, but also allows for the propagation of long-lived allergic responses.

In the Pepper lab, we study how cells of the adaptive immune system, called CD4+ T cells and B cells, form immunological memory by visualizing their differentiation, retention and function in both mice and humans. We accomplish this by using novel tetramer-based enrichment strategies to study small populations of antigen specific CD4+ T and B cells in both complex infectious diseases such as malaria as well as during allergic asthma using a house dust mite model. We additionally use transgenic mice with various genetic ablations to interrogate the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in memory cell development and function.

​The overarching goals of these studies are to both enhance immune memory to design better vaccines and inversely block the formation of immune memory to prevent allergic disease.