AIMRC Seminar: The Role of Fever in Macrophage Responses

Courtesy of Jeannine Durdik

Jeannine Durdik, professor of biological sciences at the U of A.

The Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center will host Jeannine Durdik, professor of biological sciences at the U of A, at 12:55 p.m. Wednesday April 19, in White Engineering Hall room 209, when Durdik will discuss her research on fever, the human body's immune responses to fever and how aging affects these responses. 

Fever is a correlate of lower mortality during infections. This makes it a concern that fever responses are blunted in the aged who are at higher risk of infection-driven mortality. Durdik is studying the modulatory roles of fever temperatures on the responses of macrophages, which are important players in innate immunity, as well as the effects of ageing on this interplay.

Her lab is working to understand how macrophages sense fever temperatures, how they respond to these temperatures and how ageing alters these events. These are issues of great relevance and interest, both in terms of basic mechanisms involved in macrophage biology and in terms of a translational understanding of macrophage functions during fever in both young and aged individuals. Durdik's group mainly uses a mouse model system but has extended studies of fever temperatures to other warm- and cold-blooded vertebrates.

Durdik started working in immunology as an honors undergraduate at Purdue and then earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University while studying the specificity of natural killer cells. As a post-doctoral fellow at Brandeis University, she discovered the deletion of the Immunoglobulin kappa light chain in the recombination of lambda light chain recombination.

Her first faculty job was at the University of Colorado Medical School, where she studied the mechanism of trans-chromosomal recombination in order for a transgenic IgM to switch to "downstream" IgG classes, which is usually a cis chromosomal event, but in this case, was trans-chromosomal. She then joined the Biological Sciences Department at the U of A, where she focused on memory responses in T cells and through that became interested in aging immune responses. She has enjoyed mentoring a large number of honors undergraduates and meaningful collaborations with colleagues. 

This seminar is also available via Zoom.  

Pizza and beverages will be served in ENGR 209.   

This event is supported by the NIGMS of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P20GM139768. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.