Daniela Weiskopf | Research Assistant Professor
La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology

Daniela has devoted her career to understanding the T-cell response to viral pathogens and relevant to human health and disease. In 2009, she received my PhD in Immunology from Innsbruck Medical University, Austria, where she performed research analyzing posttranslational modifications of virus-derived epitopes and modulation of the T cell immune response during aging. Following her Ph.D., she obtained post-doctoral training at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) where my efforts were dedicated to characterizing human dengue virus-specific CD8+ and CD4+ T cell responses in samples from areas with endemic dengue infection and following experimental dengue vaccination. She has further expanded my repertoire to study Zika and Chikungunya virus-specific T-cell responses. As a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Research at LJI she has recently focused on the characterization of SARS-CoV-2 specific T cell responses. Understanding adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 is essential for vaccine development efforts, interpreting disease pathogenesis, and calibrating future pandemic control measures.