Scientific Founder

Dr. Ting has more than 35 years of research experience in studying innate immune sensors and receptors and their roles in inflammation, cancer and infection. She is a co-discoverer of the NLR family (nucleotide binding leucine rich repeat proteins or NOD-like receptors) of inflammasome forming receptors. Her group first described the human NLR gene family, which included a few known genes and sixteen new genes. She has studied the divergent roles of this family and have uncovered their roles in transcriptional activation, inflammasome activation, cytokine processing, cell death and autophagy. She is an expert in inflammasome research and published the first paper documenting the roles of NLR inflammasomes in high fat diet induced type 2 diabetes which has been cited over 1000 times.  She also published the first papers on the roles of inflammasomes in colitis, colon cancer, neuroinflammation, autoimmune diseases and viral infection.   Dr. Ting has trained over 60 postdoctoral fellows, physician scientists and 35 pre-doctoral students. Her team has published over 320 papers and have been consistently on the Reuters / Clarivate highly cited researcher list. Dr. Ting has numerous honors and awards from organizations such as ACS, AAI, NIH, & MS Society. Currently, she serves on the board of Burroughs Wellcome Fund and is president-elect (2020-21) of American Association of Immunologists.