Prof. E. John Wherry University of Pennsylvania, USA

Dr. E. John Wherry is the Barbara and Richard Schiffrin President’s Distinguished Professor, Chair of the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine, and Director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Immunology. He has received numerous honors including the Distinguished Alumni award from... read morethe Thomas Jefferson University and the Cancer Research Institute’s Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology. Dr. Wherry has over 260 publications, which have been cited over 67,000 times.
Dr. Wherry helped pioneering the field of T cell exhaustion, the mechanism by which T cell responses are attenuated during chronic infections and cancer. He also helped identify the role of the “checkpoint” molecule PD-1 and others for reinvigoration of exhausted T cells in cancer. His laboratory has recently focused on applying Systems Immunology approaches to define Immune Health patients across a spectrum of diseases. In 2020-2021, Dr. Wherry’s laboratory focused considerable efforts on the immunology of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 vaccination including establishing a new Immune Health Project to interrogate and use immune features to identify novel treatment opportunities.