Hamlet Chu

E-mail: chuxx080@umn.edu

Thesis Advisor: Marc Jenkins

Year entered: 2005

Degrees received:
B.S., Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, 2004

Honors and awards:

• American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship, January 2008 - December 2009
• Scholarship, Keystone Meeting - Tolerance in Transplantation and Autoimmunity, January 2008
• Golden Pipetman Award, Fall Semester 2007
• Scholarship, Keystone Meeting - Immunological Memory, March 2007

Thesis research:
The immune system of a healthy person contains millions of T cell clones, each expressing a T-cell antigen receptor (TCR) generated by a random gene shuffling mechanism. Each TCR recognizes an antigen in the form of a specific peptide bound to a major histocompatibility complex molecule (pMHC). My goal is to determine how thymic selection processes contributes to the population size and antigen-specificity of a pMHC-focused diverse T cell repertoire. To achieve these goals, I will use the soluble-pMHC magnetic enrichment technique developed in our laboratory to isolate and analyze the size and pMHC-specificity of T cell populations in different mouse models. This novel approach will allow a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative effects of thymic selection in shaping T cell repertoire.

Publications:

• Burchill MA, J Yang, KB Kang, JJ Moon, HH Chu, CW Lio, AL Vegoe, CS Hsieh,
  MK Jenkins, MA Farrar. 2008. Linked T cell receptor and cytokine signaling govern the development of the regulatory T cell repertoire. Immunity. Jan;28(1):112-21.
• Moon JJ*, HH Chu*, M Pepper, SJ McSorley, SC Jameson, KM Ross, MK Jenkins. 2007. Naïve CD4+ T cell frequency varies for different epitopes and predicts repertoire diversity and response magnitude. Immunity. Aug;27(2):203-13. (*co-first authors)