Dr Cecilia Lindestam Arlehamn | Instructor, Division of Vaccine Discovery
La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology

Dr. Arlehamn received her PhD in 2009 from the University of Glasgow, Scotland where she studied inflammasome activation by bacterial products. Following the completion of her graduate studies in 2009, she joined Dr. Sette’s lab as a post-doctoral fellow. Dr. Arlehamn’s studies have since been dedicated to defining T cell responses against Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Dr. Arlehamn has ten years of experience in studying immune responses to lung pathogens and six years specifically studying the role of T cells in MTB infection. Her data has provided cardinal evidence that the T cell response to MTB is broader than previously thought and mediated by a specific Th cell subset. She has also studied the immunological consequences of epitope conservation in MTB and beyond, where she found that reactivity in non-exposed individuals could be explained by sequence conservation of the epitope in Mycobacterium species that are found in the environment. Dr. Arlehamn’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed high-impact journals and has been presented at numerous MTB and infectious disease conferences.