People
Mark E. Snyder, MD
Principal Investigator
Mark completed his undergraduate in Economics (yes, Economics) at Cornell University followed by a pre-medical post-baccalaureate from Columbia University (apparently you need to take biology to go to medical school). He later graduated from the SUNY Stony Brook School of Medicine and completed his training in internal medicine and pulmonary and critical care medicine at Columbia University. After finishing his clinical training, Mark joined the laboratory of Dr. Donna Farber at the Columbia Center of Translational Immunology to do a post-doctorate in transplant immunology. In 2018, Mark moved to the University of Pittsburgh to start his own laboratory and join the Starzl Transplantation Institute where he is lucky enough to work with some of the brightest immunologists in the world.
Andrew Craig
Research Technician
Andrew graduated from Penn State University with a bachelor’s degree in biology. After graduation, he started working at the University of Pitt as a caretaker for the DLAR. Shortly after he transferred to our lab as a research technician. He has taken on the challenging task of training others in the techniques of multiparameter flow cytometry and immunofluorescence imaging.
Allyson Lieberman, MD, PhD
T32 Research Fellow
Allyson is a 3rd-year T32 research fellow in the pulmonary and critical care division. Her fellowship project investigates tissue resident memory T cells in the human lung as well as molecular mechanisms of chronic lung allograft dysfunction in lung transplant. She hopes to pursue a career as a clinician scientist in transplant pulmonology. When she’s not in the clinic or the lab, Allyson enjoys container gardening, sewing, crafting, and playing way too many video games.
Madeline Lipp
Graduate Student
Madeline is a PhD Candidate in Clinical Pharmaceutical Sciences, beginning her studies at Pitt in 2019. Her research focuses on the influence of age on TRM establishment, as well as how lung TRMs can be targeted to improve clinical outcomes in RSV disease.
Kaveh Moghbeli, MD
Postdoctoral Researcher
Kaveh joined the lab in 2022, focusing on systems immunology where he will be working closely with us to investigate computational means to impute T cell receptor epitope discovery. Additionally, he will be working with one of our brilliant collaborators, Dr. Jishnu Das (jishnulab.org) to focus on multi-omics analyses.
Jetina Okereke, MD
Postdoctoral Researcher
Michelle Rojas
Graduate Student
Michelle grew up in a small town in southern Ecuador. She moved to the country’s capital to study at the Universidad de las Américas, where she graduated as a biotechnology engineer. Her undergraduate project was about cyanobacteria and their relationship with public health. After working in different areas such as industry, clinical, and education, she decided to study her master’s degree at the Universidad de Granada, Spain, where she graduated in R+D+i and drug quality, with a thesis focused on pharmacogenetics applied in the clinic. She is pursuing a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology, Biomedicine, and Biotechnology at the Universidad de Extremadura. Her project is related to discovering epitopes associated with the alloreactive response in lung tissue using immunopeptidomics. In her free time, she advises students on how to achieve their career goals.
Lab Alumni
Minahal Abbas
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Current position: PharmD school
Anna Bondonese
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Anna joined the lab in 2019 until she left for medical school in 2021 (to come back for a research summer between first and second year). She is currently a third-year medical student at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.
Zachary Lakkis
Research Technician
Current position: Medical Student at Emory University
Zach grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated in May 2023 from Cornell University with a major in Biological Sciences. His undergraduate honors thesis project explored the mechanisms of Huntington’s disease in a Drosophila model. Zach is interested in the discovery of specific epitopes responsible for activating T cells in chronic lung allograft dysfunction. He is applying to medical school and hopes to become a physician scientist. In his free time, Zach loves to bike, cook, and play video games.