Dr. Ning Jenny Jiang, a distinguished cancer researcher whose early work has contributed to understanding the immune response to diseases, has joined The University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Dr. Ning Jenny Jiang, a distinguished cancer researcher whose early work has contributed to understanding the immune response to diseases, has joined The University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Ning Jenny Jiang
Previously a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, Dr. Jiang’s research is focused on systems immunology with the ultimate goal of creating effective regenerative medicines and therapies for cancer and other diseases. She is working on the mechanisms of how the immune system develops and ages and why it tolerates tumors. Jiang uses high-throughput sequencing and single-cell analysis in combination with quantitative analysis to gain a better understanding of immune system functionality.
“The BME Department is fortunate to have an exceptional scientist with Jenny Jiang’s credentials,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Peppas, Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Fletcher Stuckey Pratt Chair in Engineering. “Her work on how the T-cell receptor interacts with peptide major histocompatibility complexes to discriminate pathogens from self-antigens and trigger adaptive immune responses is pioneering and will provide major new ways for treating cancer.”
Indicative of her promise in the field is the fact that Jiang is the recipient of a prestigious $2 million recruitment grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). As part of its mission to fund groundbreaking cancer research, CPRIT awards funding to promising young scientists to work in Texas. Jiang will use CPRIT funding for her laboratory, which will establish a new set of metrics for cancer progression prediction and provide a foundation for developing new cancer therapies.
Dr. Jiang received her B.S. in bioengineering from Shanghai University and her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology. She was also a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Arthritis Foundation and has a patent pending in the measurement and comparison of immune diversity by high-throughput sequencing.
