Celine Farinha, NSF REU student from VCU joined our lab this summer to perform spatial analysis of receptor-mediated transplacental antibody transfer in collaboration with Caitlin and Prerak. She won first place poster at the REU Symposium! Pictured from left to right: Prerak, Caitlin, Celine.

Our collaborative work with Dr. Vic Engelhard’s lab led by Dr. Rob Barnes titled “Characterization of cancer-associated fibroblast populations that promote tertiary lymphoid structure formation in murine melanoma tumors” was published in Frontiers in Immunology! Read more here.

Dr. Dolatshahi gives an invited talk at the SIAM 2026 annual meeting at a special minis-ymposium called "Mathematical Approaches to Advancing Women's Health".

Dr. Dolatshahi gives an invited talk at the SIAM 2026 annual meeting at a special minisymposium called "Mathematical Approaches to Advancing Women's Health". This minisymposium featured 6 talks across pregnancy and hormone impacts and sex differences in physiology. We also had a roundtable discussion about the future of math modeling for women's health.

Caitlin Sullivan was awarded the Wagner Fellowship! This is yet another accomplishment for Caitlin this summer. The Wagner Fellowship Fund honors graduate students in the basic sciences within the School of Medicine who have demonstrated outstanding scientific potential, accomplishments, and service to their communities.

Prerak presents his first poster in the Dolatshahi lab at the Southeastern Immunology Symposium 2026 in Asheville, NC. He had many good conversations with visitors of his poster!

Our new book chapter titled “Other Engineering Technologies: Systems Biology Approaches for Understanding Maternal–Neonatal Immunology” is now online in: Zambuto, S.G., Oyen, M.L. (eds) Biomaterials for Women’s Health Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-10745-9_24. Give it a read and see if you would like to take on this challenge alongside us! :)

Caitlin passed her qualifying exam and is officially a Ph.D. candidate as of today!

Congratulations, Prerak!

Yet another success for Emily, congratulations!

Emily was awarded the graduate Research Fellowship by NSF for her research to develop an In Vitro–In Silico Hybrid Model of Maternal–Fetal Interfaces to Quantify Immune Transfer from Mother to Infant. Very well-deserved, Emily!

Shay wins an All-University Graduate Teaching Award in recognition of your dedication and outstanding achievement. Shay has made significant contributions to teaching and caring for the students in our department. She co-taught with me, Systems Immunology and Immunoengineering (BME4550/6550), in Spring 2025 as part of the UVA Engineering teaching fellowship program (another prestigious award that she received last year). She was the graduate teaching assistant (TA) for the third-year core undergraduate course Biomedical Systems Analysis and Design (BME 3310) in Fall 2025, as well as the Biomedical Engineering Capstone Design class in 2024.  In all of these efforts, she demonstrated creativity and innovation in effectively engaging the students and facilitating their learning for a variety of topics spanning computational techniques, immunology fundamentals, biomedical engineering design, and science communication. Congratulations, Shay!

Talented undergraduate student Virginia (Ginna) Swarr received an award to pursue funded research in the Dolatshahi Lab in summer 2025. Ginna’s work is focused on decoding placental ommune signaling pathways governing Fc-mediated IgG transfer in the context of maternal Social Determinants of Health (SDoH). She has been working with PhD student Emily Bubonovich since the beginning of 2026.

Rob’s PhD work motivated him to stay in the lab and see his work through to a targeted therapeutic solution for Colorectal Cancer. Our lab received seed funds from the Wallace H. Coulter Center for Translational Research at UVA for Rob’s research. Congratulations, Rob!

Gabe Hanson and Kate Goundry co-first authored a paper (together with Remziye and our collaborators) titled “A flexible systems analysis pipeline for elucidating key spatial relationships in the tumor microenvironment linked with cellular phenotypes and patient-level features“ in the Frontiers in Immunologyjournal. Congratulations, team! This pipeline involves a two-step process that takes single-cell spatial data as input, first quantifying the local cellular neighborhoods around each cell, and then applying multivariate statistical analysis to uncover spatial patterns and associations. The codes are available at our lab’s GitHub page.

This work, titled “Uncovering Cellular Interactome Drivers of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Response in Advanced Melanoma Patients” was accepted for publication in the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Journal. Shay and team (Anne, Mary, Rob, Remziye, Gabe) used computational network inference approaches to infer the cellular interaction network in the melanoma tumor microenvironment (TME) to predict response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) and also used the network remodeling of intercellular interactions pre- to post-ICI in non-responders to reveal hallmarks of a non-responding interactome.

This work combined experimental temporal single cell analysis with mechanistic and data-driven computational modeling and identified the LAG3+ bispecific antibody armed T cells (BATs) as the primary effectors, while TIGIT expression dampened their cytotoxic function. Our work informs the rational selection of combination therapy to maximize BATs antitumor function.

Emily and Prerak joined our team this month! Three PhD students graduated from the Dolatshahi lab this summer. We look forward to seeing how Prerak and Emily build upon their important scientific contributions!

Rob’s translational PhD dissertation work impressed his audience today! Congratulations, Rob!

Remziye impressed the audience by a strong PhD dissertation defense and many achievements to show for it. Congratulations, Remziye!

Shay received one of the first Outstanding Student Awards from the Graduate Engineering Student Council for excellence in peer mentorship. Shay was nominated by two of her lab mates and students who commented on her enthusiasm and dedication to supporting them inside and outside of the classroom. 

Gabe successfully defended his PhD dissertation today! A well-deserved congratulations to our newest grad!

This is a highly competitive award across all graduate degree-conferring departments in the School of Medicine and is awarded to one student per year! Here is a News piece highlighting her work: https://med.virginia.edu/bims/remizye-wessel-2025-jill-e-hungerford-student-award-winner/

Way to go, Remziye! This award is given to one PhD student in the BME department each year. For Remziye, this award comes after many other successes this year and late 2024 such as Endowed Victor Orphan Graduate Fellowship (2024-2025) and together with Gabe, they won SEAS “Engineering is Beautiful” art contest (May 2024).

News archive for 2020-2025 can be found here.