When: May 10th 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: FLTC 201
Please RSVP HERE
Dr. Jennifer Philips
Official Story
Dr. Philips received her B.A. in Biochemistry from Columbia University and her MD/PhD from the University of California, San Francisco. She did her graduate work in the laboratory of Dr. Ira Herskowitz, followed by Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Her interest in innate immunity and tuberculosis led her to do postdoctoral research in the laboratories of Eric Rubin and Norbert Perrimon at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. After her fellowship training, Dr. Philips worked as a Translational Medicine Expert in the Infectious Disease Area of Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, MA, working on early stage antibiotics and antivirals. After two years, Dr. Philips left Novartis to start her own laboratory at the NYU School of Medicine. Her lab investigates how Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis, evades immune clearance to cause disease. M. tuberculosis is second only to SARS-CoV-2 as an infectious disease cause of death worldwide. For decades, researchers have tried to understand why the immune system fails to clear M. tuberculosis. Dr. Philips’s laboratory elucidates the molecular mechanisms that enable Mtb to disable antimicrobial activity of innate immune cells and to impair clearance by the adaptive immune response. In 2015, Dr. Philips was recruited to Washington University School of Medicine. She sees patients on the Infectious Disease service at Barnes Jewish Hospital and runs an NIH-funded research program studying Mycobacterium tuberculosis pathogenesis. In 2019, she became the Co-Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at Washington University. She has received a number of honors, including election to membership in the American Society of Clinical Investigation and as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and Infectious Disease Society of America.
Unofficial Story
Dr. Philips was born in Madison, Wisconsin, where her parents, as college students, became involved in the anti-Vietnam war effort. They placed importance on working for peace, justice, and making the world a better place for everyone. These became core values that informed her choices. Dr. Philips went to public schools, where her mom worked as a teacher for children with special needs. Dr. Philips noticed that men in her family who were doctors and scientist helped people, loved their jobs, and were respected, in a way that many of the women (who were largely teachers) were not. She always liked science and when she started college at Columbia, she considered both graduate and medical school. Working in several laboratories while she was an undergrad further convinced her that she should go to graduate school, and she embarked on an MD/PhD program at UCSF. She enjoyed both graduate and medical school, and after finishing, she moved back across the country to start her internship in Boston. This meant, despite her PhD, she was back at the bottom of the totem pole. In the first weeks of internship, she spent her 30th birthday alone, on call, eating dinner in the hospital cafeteria. During this same year, she heard college classmates interviewed on NPR. It still seemed like an impossibly long path before she would know if she would be “successful” in science and/or medicine. In order to short track (and get back to lab sooner), she had to apply to fellowship as an intern. She applied in Infectious Diseases, although she had yet to do an ID elective. Luckily, she found that Infectious Diseases was a good fit for her. She chose to work on tuberculosis because of its importance in global health, the large need for better diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines, as well as the fascinating scientific questions it posed. Infectious Diseases was also a fortuitus choice because she met her future husband when they took care of a patient with cryptococcal meningitis (he was a neurology resident; she was the ID fellow). After getting married, they lived apart for more than a year, while she started her lab at NYU, and he finished his fellowship work in Boston. He moved to NYC just before they had their first child, who arrived on her 40th birthday. A decade after her disheartening birthday dinner in the hospital cafeteria, she finally had her own laboratory and also a growing family. She now has two amazing kids. She sees patients on the Infectious Disease service at Barnes and runs a laboratory investigating the pathogenesis of TB. Both she and her husband work at Wash U and live in the Central West End. Her husband does more of the cooking. She tries to keep the house from falling apart.