Katie Gostic
Research Scientist
205 Erman Hall
1103 E 57th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
Dr. Gostic is now an alumna of the Cobey lab. Below is an archived description.
Katie joined the lab as a McDonnell Foundation Complex Systems Postdoc after completing her PhD at UCLA. As a doctoral student, she studied immune imprinting, a pattern in which individuals retain particularly strong, lifelong immune memory of the influenza viruses encountered in childhood, sometimes at the expense of equally strong protection against strains encountered later in life.
Now Katie studies the immune processes that allow such biases in immune memory to develop. Ultimately, her research aims to understand epidemiological outcomes as an emergent property of within-host immune dynamics. She hopes insights from her research can help bridge the gap between immunology and epidemiology, and inform influenza vaccination strategies.
When not doing science, Katie loves to backpack and hike in the mountains, and freediving in the kelp forests of California.