Paul Maurizio Bio | First Generation Lower Income Immigrant Network

Postdoctoral Scholar, Section in Genetic Medicine, Department of Medicine

Gender Pronouns: He/him/his

I am a postdoc in immunogenomics in the Department of Medicine at UChicago, where I work on understanding the effect of social stress on gene regulation in the immune system, and the host response to pathogens using single-cell RNA-sequencing. We use a rhesus macaque model of stress, which allows us to test the biological regulatory effects of social dominance hierarchies that we can experimentally alter. I hope this work will contribute to our understanding of the interactions between stress, aging, immunity, and cell-type specific gene regulation, to ultimately reduce population health disparities. This research is funded through my PI, Dr. Luis Barreiro (NIH R01 grant), as well as a pilot research grant from the Department of Medicine.

I earned my PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although my current research focuses on understanding how the (social) environment contributes to differences in immunity across individuals, for my PhD, I focused on the role of host genetic effects on disparities in health outcomes, specifically the response to influenza virus, which is a major cause of death, globally, each year. My research was a hybrid of experimental data generation and statistical modeling, and was supported in part by an NIH T32 training grant in the molecular biology of viral diseases.

I completed my masters degree and in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where my research and coursework were supported by a Joshua Lippincott Fellowship, a Simpson Student Award, and a Global Health Field Research Award. I earned my BA in Biochemistry and Religion from Swarthmore College. Please feel free to reach me at my e-mail (maurizio@uchicago.edu), or via my website (https://mauriziopaul.github.io) or Twitter account (@TweetNTD).