Katie Deets

Postdoctoral Fellow

Katie grew up on Washington state and is a proud Pacific Northwestern-er.  She attended Seattle University, where she received a BS in Biology.  During her time at SU, she fell in love with immunology and virology and completed a senior thesis project on viral particle packaging in Foamy viruses in the lab of Carolyn Stenbak.  Katie then spent the next two and a half years as a lab manager and research technician with Pam Fink in the Immunology Department at the University of Washington.  There, she worked on a project involving the memory response of CD8+ recent thymic emigrant T cells. 

Katie went on to complete her PhD with Russell Vance at the University of California, Berkeley.  In the Vance lab, she studied the effects of NAIP-NLRC4 inflammasome activation in the intestine.  Her work contributed to the understanding of how NAIP-NLRC4 activation in intestinal epithelial cells leads to their sequential pyroptosis and expulsion into the intestinal lumen.  During her thesis work, she also found that NAIP-NLRC4 activation drives cross-presentation of intestinal epithelial cell-derived antigens in a manner that is independent from the established type 1 conventional dendritic cell pathway.  

Now as a postdoc in the Elde Lab, Katie is excited to use her experience as an immunologist to learn more about the evolution of host-pathogen interactions.

Katie was initially hesitant to move to a land-locked state, but she is now “so stoked” to be living at the edge of the Wasatch in Salt Lake City.  She spends her free time trail running, biking, skiing, backpacking, reading and working on jigsaw puzzles.