Mercedes Rincon

Defining immune responses to infection and autoimmune diseases

Interests among the research faculty include transcriptional regulation of cytokine genes, death receptor signaling, gamma delta T cells, immunogenetics of infectious and autoimmune diseases, and host response to arenavirus and hantavirus infection.

Collaborative faculty interests include immune responses to several viruses, bacteria, and parasites, as well as asthma, transplantation and tolerance, and maternal/fetal immunology. A large number of faculty participate in the Vermont Center for Immunology and Infectious Diseases, funded by an NIH COBRE grant.

 

Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE)

The Immunobiology faculty partnered with faculty in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics since 2006 to successfully compete for a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) Award from NIH (NCRR). This allowed the formation of the Vermont Center for Immunology and Infectious Diseases (VCIID), which now numbers 25 faculty in eight departments in three colleges and is in close alliance with the Vaccine Testing Center.  The VCIID has a weekly joint Research-in-Progress meeting, seminar series, and a journal club.  This provides a regular forum for students and postdoctoral fellows to present their research progress as well as for faculty to review hypotheses and specific aims of planned grants. 

During the first 10 years of COBRE funding, VCIID faculty published 419 articles and received over $92 million in funding.  This also provided funds to allow the Larner College of Medicine to build a new BSL3 facility in partnership with the Vermont Department of Health (opened spring, 2016), and to recruit new faculty to the theme of the host response to infection.  We also have a T32 Training Grant from NIH, also in its 13th year, to support the salaries of our graduate students.