Associate Editors

María Casanova-Acebes, 2025

Since January 2021, María Casanova-Acebes has been a Junior Group Leader at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO, Madrid), leading the Laboratory of Cancer Immunity. As a graduate student with Andrés Hidalgo at CNIC, she established for the first time how circadian cues control neutrophil aging and clearance from circulation, which in turn control the physiology of hematopoietic and metastasis-prone organs such as the bone marrow, and the lung (Cell 2023, JEM 2018). Awarded a Human Frontiers Long-Term postdoctoral fellowship, she then moved to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York to carry out her postdoctoral studies under the supervision of Miriam Merad, where she discovered that resident macrophages in the lung control early regulatory T cell expansion and EMT programs in lung cancer (Nature 2021).

The Casanova-Acebes lab investigates how micro- and macro-environmental factors shape myeloid cells in tumors, intending to uncover new actionable targets in this compartment to treat cancer. As of 2024, María Casanova-Acebes has published >20 articles in top scientific journals, which have been cited > 5,000 times. She has received several prizes and awards, including an ERC Starting Grant in 2023. María is actively involved in public outreach and research dissemination projects, and she has been recently selected as a member of the Spanish Young Academy in 2023. In her (little!) spare time, María is a passionate reader and loves playing with her kids.

David Gate, 2025

Dr. David Gate is the Director of the Abrams Research Center on Neurogenomics in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Dr. Gate is a neuroimmunologist who studies neuroinflammatory mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases. His research has contributed to our understanding of the role of immune responses in Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, his group has been exploring the impact of anti-amyloid antibodies on microglial function.

Elisa Oricchio, 2025

Elisa Oricchio is the Director of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) and a professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. She received her PhD in 2008 in Italy, and did her post-doctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where she gained expertise in cancer genomics, genetic manipulation of transgenic animal models, and pre-clinical treatment studies. Currently, her research focuses on cancer genome organization in the 3D space. She is also developing new models to study responses to therapy and use high throughput screening to identify new therapeutic targets. In her work, she combined experimental and computational analyses to understand and ultimately block the tumor’s origin and progression. Throughout her career, she has identified genes that can be used as new therapeutic targets or as biomarkers to better classify cancer patients. Her work has been recognized internationally with the European Translational Cancer Research Award, the Leenaards Prize for Translation Research, the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists by the New York Academy of Science, and the Lorini Award for Italian Scientist in Cancer Research. 

Tim O’Sullivan, 2025

Tim O’Sullivan, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His laboratory aims to understand how the innate immune system is regulated during inflammation.  Using systemic approaches, the O’Sullivan lab uses clinical datasets and gene editing to predict and validate critical pathways that regulate human innate immunity. Targets are engineered using CRISPR tools to facilitate the development of next generation cellular and in vivo gene editing therapies for autoimmunity, immune deficiencies, and cancer. Tim joined JEM as Associate Academic Editor in 2025. 

Ashley St. John, 2025

Dr. Ashley St. John is an Associate Professor in the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School. She also holds appointments in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, at the National University of Singapore, the Department of Pathology at Duke University, and the SingHealth Duke-NUS Global Health Institute. In 2023, she received an Investigatorship award from the National Research Council of Singapore. Her research program focuses on viral immunology with an emphasis on developing novel vaccination strategies, diagnostics, and therapeutics for infectious diseases. She also studies immune responses at the intersection of infectious and allergic diseases, particularly involving the role of mast cells.

Tuoqi Wu, 2025

Tuoqi Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, and an investigator at the O'Donnell Brain Institute. He received his PhD degree in 2013 studying the regulation of antiviral T cell immunity by microRNAs under the supervision of Dr. Rafi Ahmed at Emory University. He then completed his postdoctoral training in transcriptional regulation of T cell stemness and exhaustion with Dr. Pamela Schwartzberg at the National Institutes of Health. He started his independent research group in 2019. His research interests focus on how chronic infection, cancer, and aging dysregulates T cell immunity and how to reinvigorate T cells by harnessing their differentiation program. He received the V Scholar Award, the ASPIRE Award for Outstanding Early Career Investigators, and the ICIS-Regeneron New Investigator Award.

Elena Hsieh, 2024

Elena Hsieh earned her MD degree from University of California San Francisco (UCSF) in 2008. She completed a residency in pediatrics at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011 and a fellowship in Allergy and Immunology at Stanford University in 2014. During her fellowship, she worked in Dr. Garry Nolan’s laboratory studying pediatric lupus. She continued her research and clinical work at Stanford University as an instructor for an additional year. In 2015, she joined the faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, jointly affiliated with the Children’s Hospital of Colorado. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology and in the Department of Pediatrics, section of Allergy and Immunology. She is the Director of the Jeffrey Modell Center for Primary Immunodeficiency and co-directs the Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Newborn Screen Program, both of which constitute the foundation of the immunodeficiency program at Children’s Hospital Colorado. She is also the Director for the FOCIS Center of Excellence at the University of Colorado. The Hsieh lab addresses mechanistic and translational questions in human immunology to enable a deeper understanding of normal immune function, dysregulated immune processes in immunodeficiency and autoimmunity, and the overlap between the two.

Caroline Menard, 2024

Caroline Menard is an Associate Professor at the Universite Laval Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, affiliated with the CERVO Brain Research Center in Quebec City, Canada. Caroline earned a PhD in biophysics and cell biology at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivieres for her work on brain phospholipases and glutamate receptor properties. She did postdoctoral training at McGill University in Montreal with Remi Quirion and at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York with Scott Russo exploring behavioral responses and underlying biology in the context of stress, aging, and Alzheimer’s disease. Her research interests focus on the blood–brain barrier and gut barrier adaptations driving stress susceptibility vs resilience, cognition, and the development of mood disorders. Her program combines behavioral experiments performed in animal models with functional, molecular, and imaging studies, and rodent findings are validated in human samples in collaboration with clinicians and biobanks.

Stefanie Spranger, 2024

Stefani Spranger, PhD, received a doctorate in immunology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, in Munich, Germany in 2011, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in tumor immunology at The University of Chicago. In 2017, she accepted a position as the Assistant Professor of Biology at MIT and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and was  promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. She received the Pew Steward scholarship, a V Foundation Scholarship, and the Young Investigator Award from the Melanoma Research Alliance. She was elected to the Board of Directors of SITC in 2019 and serves as an editor for the Journal of Immunotherapy of Cancer.

Franklin Zhong, 2024

Franklin Zhong joined the faculty at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in 2019 as Nanyang Assistant Professor. His lab’s research focuses on the inner workings of the human innate immune system in barrier tissues, such as the skin and the airway. He completed his postdoctoral training at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore in 2019 in human genetics. Assistant Professor Zhong holds a PhD in cancer biology from Stanford University and a bachelor’s in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK.