 |
Mariano Sanchez-Lockhart, Ph.D. |
- Name: Mariano Sanchez-Lockhart, Ph.D.
- Title: Assistant professor, UNMC Department of Pathology and Microbiology, College of Medicine
- Joined UNMC: September 2015
- Hometown: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Research focus:
Infectious diseases, immune responses and vaccination
The goal of my research is to characterize the humoral and cellular immune response to pathogen infection or vaccination. The Center for Genome Sciences utilized genomics tools to perform genotyping (MHC and SNPs analysis); epitope mapping of the humoral response (phage display system platform) and B and T cell repertoire analysis by VDJ rearrangement using high-throughput sequencing.
The New Investigator Award
New Investigator Awards go to outstanding UNMC scientists who in the past two years have secured their first funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense or other national sources.
New Investigators also had to demonstrate scholarly activity such as publishing their research and/or presenting their findings at national conventions.
My research will make a difference because these novel immunomic tools will help to:
- Define immunological biomarkers for protection and disease prognosis. This is crucial when working with dangerous pathogens, where the assessment of the vaccine efficacy has to be done using the animal rule and defined correlates of protection;
- Develop diagnosis tools that will help in the earlier and more accurate detection of the pathogen infection; and
- Improve vaccine designs and efficacy.
The best advice I’ve ever been given is:
The problem is not to make a mistake, but not to learn from it.
Three things you may not know about me
- I lived five years in Brazil as a teenager, and I did parades at an Escola do Samba during carnival (two years in a row). Our Escola actually won the first place (of course, not thanks to my dancing skills).
- My wife, Maria, and I have five kids — and we survived. (They also, so far.)
- I met my wife 550 miles away from home, but we lived only 10 blocks away from each other (and never met before that). However, in a big city, we might have ridden the subway together multiple times.