Job Summary:

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is seeking an experienced and highly motivated individual to join Dr. Darrell Irvine’s laboratory at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. This position will provide an excellent opportunity for someone wishing to contribute to a highly interdisciplinary laboratory environment engaged in cutting edge research in immunology, vaccine design, and cancer immunotherapy.The Irvine laboratory works at the interface of materials science and immunology. Synthetic materials can be applied in two major ways to 'immunobioengineering': (1) Synthetic materials can modulate the function of immune cells by mimicking signals derived from the immune system or foreign pathogens, both as a probe for cell function and as a tool for immunotherapy- both in vitro and in vivo . (2) Synthetic materials can be used to create in vitro and in vivo models of the microenvironment present in lymphoid and non-lymphoid tissues, to better understand immunobiology in health and disease. Our ongoing research focuses in 2 major directions: Our first area of focus is in the development of a vaccine for HIV. We are developing nanoparticles and microparticles that can be used to deliver vaccine antigens and immunostimulatory adjuvant molecules, and testing these in collaboration with colleagues in the Boston area in relevant preclinical models. We are also applying model systems developed in our lab for studying T-cell activation to understanding the properties of immune cells that may be important to control HIV infection. Much of this work is in collaboration with investigators of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. Our second focus is in cancer immunotherapy. Using our lab’s expertise in drug delivery particles and gels, we are exploring strategies to promote, amplify, and maintain anti-tumor immune responses by controlling where and when cells of the immune system are triggered to respond to tumor cells, and seeking to overcome the immunosuppressive milieu developed in solid tumors.