Miriam Merad
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Primary Section: 43, Immunology and Inflammation Secondary Section: 41, Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
Miriam Merad, M.D.; Ph.D. is the Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the Director of the Mount Sinai Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC). Dr. Merad is an internationally acclaimed physician-scientist and a leader in the fields of dendritic cell and macrophage biology with a focus on their contribution to human diseases. Dr. Merad identified the tissue resident macrophage lineage and revealed its distinct role in organ physiology and pathophysiology. She established the contribution of this macrophage lineage to cancer progression and inflammatory diseases and is now working on the development of novel macrophage-targeted therapies for these conditions. In addition to her work on macrophages, Dr. Merad is known for her work on dendritic cells, a group of cells that control adaptive immunity. She identified a new subset of dendritic cells, which is now considered a key target of antiviral and antitumor immunity. Dr. Merad leads the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine (PrIISM) to bring immunology discoveries to the clinic. PrIISM integrates immunological research programs with synergistic expertise in biology, medicine, technology, physics, mathematics and computational biology to enhance our understanding of human immunology. She also founded the Human Immune Monitoring Center at Mount Sinai, one of the world’s most sophisticated research centers, which uses cutting-edge single-cell technology to understand the contribution of immune cells to major human diseases or treatment responses. Dr. Merad has authored more than 200 primary papers and reviews in high profile journals. Her work has been cited several thousand times. She receives generous funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research on innate immunity and their contribution to human disease, and belongs to several NIH consortia. She is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the recipient of the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology. She is the President-elect of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS). In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of her contributions to the field of immunology.
Research Interests
My research over the past 20 years has focused on understanding the regulation of tissue resident dendritic cells and macrophages during homeostasis, and examining how these regulations are changed in cancer and inflammatory diseases. My laboratory made seminal discoveries in mononuclear phagocyte biology. We were the first to identify the tissue resident macrophage lineage and opposed it to monocyte-derived macrophages. We also were the first to identify the CD103+ DC lineage now known as DC1. The overarching goal of my laboratory continues to be the identification of dysregulated pathways in macrophages and dendritic cells that can be harnessed to treat Cancer and Inflammatory diseases using both genetically engineered mouse models and human lesions to address these questions. Currently, we are using unbiased single cell sequencing and mass cytometry platforms to map changes in human lesions that can help unravel novel immune pathways that contribute to disease progression and response to treatment.
