Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Dr. Brittany Hartwell is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Her lab’s research in immunoengineering combines perspectives from biomolecular engineering, drug delivery, and immunology to develop molecular platforms that can target specific cells and tissues of the immune system to direct the immune response, with a particular focus on targeting the mucosa. This work has broad applications ranging from the development of antigen-specific immunotherapies that induce immune tolerance to treat autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases, to development of targeted vaccines that induce immune activation to protect against cancer and infectious diseases. For this work she was recently selected as one of four researchers worldwide to receive a 2022 Michelson Prize, recognizing early career investigators who represent “the next generation of innovators in human immunology and vaccine research”. Before joining the University of Minnesota in Fall 2021, Dr. Hartwell was a postdoc with Darrell Irvine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked on developing targeted mucosal vaccines against HIV and SARS-CoV-2. As a postdoc, she was affiliated with the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. Dr. Hartwell obtained her PhD in biomolecular engineering with Cory Berkland at the University of Kansas as a Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellow. Her doctoral research focused on developing an antigen-specific immunotherapy to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases. Prior to KU, Dr. Hartwell received her B.S. in chemical and biological engineering from Iowa State University where she was also a four-year letterwinner in cross country and track and played viola in the Iowa State symphony orchestra. Outside of work, Dr. Hartwell mostly stays busy chasing around her two daughters aged 5y and 18mo.
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Elucidating Vaccine Trafficking Mechanisms using Multimodal Imaging
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
11:30 AM – 12:00 PM US CST