About me
Hello! Thanks for checking out my website. My name is Maddie Lee and I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota. I was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2019 with an A.B. in Biology. As an undergraduate, I worked in the lab of Dr. Todd Fehiniger at the Washington University School of Medicine, where I developed an interest in NK cells. I followed this passion to Dr. Catherine Blish’s lab at Stanford University, where the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 drove me to study the NK cell response in the context of this disease. Through my dissertation research in the Blish Lab, I strove to generate a holistic picture of the NK cell response in COVID-19. My work sought to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on host immune cells by profiling the unique phenotypic, transcriptional, and functional profiles of primary NK cells from COVID-19 patients and exploring how crosstalk between NK cells and other peripheral immune cells underpins the changes observed in COVID-19. I also examined mechanisms of NK cell escape by mediated by SARS-CoV-2 in infected lung cells and studied how these responses are conserved or modified in variants of SARS-CoV-2 and other human coronaviruses. To learn more about each of the individual projects that comprised my thesis work, check out the graphic below!
I received my PhD in Immunology from Stanford in the spring of 2024 and subsequently moved back to my home state of Minnesota, where I am working as a postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Drs. Jeffrey Miller and Frank Cichocki at the University of Minnesota. Here, I am applying my knowledge of NK cells to the field of cancer immunotherapy by working to develop novel NK cell-based therapeutics for hematological malignancies and solid tumors.
When I’m not in lab, you can find me hiking, reading, painting, or hanging out with my cat, Minneapolis.
