Elizabeth Thompson Assistant Professor

Dr. Thompson is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studying immunometabolism in the context of vaccination and infection. Although she is an early career scientist, she has been studying immune mechanisms leading to improved vaccine responses for close to 15 years. The goal of her lab is to improve vaccine responses in individuals with dysregulated immunity and contribute to more rational therapeutic design by focusing on understanding metabolic mechanisms leading to successful immune response in the context of immunosuppression. 

She completed her bachelor’s degree at Brown University, followed by a post-bac IRTA in the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH.  She then performed her PhD training at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden in collaboration with the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH.  Her thesis work focused on the efficacy and immune mechanisms behind innate-targeting vaccine adjuvants.  She then finished her post-doctoral training in the department of Oncology and Infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University. During this time, she developed methods to evaluate immunometabolic profiles at the single cell level using high parameter flow cytometry. These tools have been used in clinical cohorts following immunotherapy, infection, and vaccination. As an independent researcher, Dr Thompson has received funding from the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR), The Sherrilyn and Ken Fisher Center for Environmental Infectious Diseases Discovery Program, an NIH K22 career transition award and the NIH loan repayment program to facilitate her research program studying immunometabolism in the context of vaccination.