Katherine A. Fitzgerald
University of Massachusetts Medical School
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Primary Section: 43, Immunology and Inflammation Secondary Section: 44, Microbial Biology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2021)
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Research Interests
Kate Fitzgerald’s laboratory is interested in understanding how the innate immune system distinguishes friend from foe to drive protective inflammatory responses. Her early work on Toll-like receptor signaling established some of the founding principles underlying the induction of pathogen-specific responses. Similarly, her discovery of TANK-Binding Kinase-1, the kinase that phosphorylates and activates interferon regulatory factors, paved the way for a greater understanding of interferon gene regulation and induction of anti-viral immunity. Her research to characterize inflammasome activation led to the discovery of Absent in Melanoma-2 as a new receptor. Her group has also defined the central role of nucleic acids as triggers of anti-microbial immunity and described new sensors and regulators of these pathways. She has also explored how the inappropriate activation of nucleic acid-sensing pathways and inflammasome pathways underlies the pathogenesis of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. More recently, she has conducted groundbreaking work on the role of long non-coding RNAs in the inflammatory response. At their core, these studies explore fundamental aspects of host defense and inflammatory diseases. The long-term goal of her work is to determine how the inappropriate activation of innate immunity underlies the pathogenesis of infectious, inflammatory, and autoimmune diseases in humans.
