Hannah Maryam Kalinoski, B.S., B.A.
Received her PhD December 2023
Hannah Kalinoski graduated with a B.S. in microbiology and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Washington. During her undergraduate program she was fortunate to work in the lab of Dr. Deborah Fuller where her project focused on optimizing a novel influenza vaccine. Following the completion of her degree, she worked as a research scientist in the lab of Dr. Michael Jensen in the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research (BTCCCR) at Seattle Children’s Hospital. During her time at BTCCCR, her work focused on evaluating novel therapies and performing the preclinical data analysis for IND submissions to the FDA. Hannah is a student in the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Department in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Currently, her work in the Čiháková lab is focused on treating viral myocarditis and preventing its progression to dilated cardiomyopathy.
Taejoon Won, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellowship June 2017- July 2023
Taejoon earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Immunology from Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea in 2005 and 2010, respectively. Through his graduate studies, he focused on developing novel prevention and treatment strategies for various immune-mediated diseases such as atopic dermatitis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, type 1 diabetes, asthma, and cancer. Taejoon served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Yasmina Laouar’s lab at the University of Michigan, where he studied the role of TGF-β on the mucosal innate immune system including innate lymphoid cells, dendritic cells, and macrophages. Taejoon joined the Cihakova lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow in July 2017 and researched the role of the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway in myocarditis, the pathogenesis of immunothrombosis in COVID-19, and the mechanisms underlying COVID-19 mRNA-related myocarditis.
Taejoon is currently (2023) an Assistant Professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he continues to contribute his expertise to the field of cardiac immunology.
David Matthew Hughes, PhD
Received his PhD May 2023
David Hughes graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2017. During the early years of his undergraduate he performed work on the plasma processing of fluids in the lab of Dr. Muhammad Malik at Old Dominion University in between academic terms. Afterwards he studied the mechanical properties of polymer blends, and how blending affects polymer strength in the lab of Dr. Jack Lesko at Virginia Tech. David earned his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in the Cihakova lab studying the role of GATA6+ pericardial macrophages during cardiac inflammation in 2023. He currently (2023) works as an Engineer for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
Diego Lema, MD, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellowship June 2021- June 2023
Diego Lema received his M.D. from the Central University of Venezuela in 2015. While earning his M.D, he also performed research at the university’s Institute of Immunology under Dr. De Sanctis’ and Dr. Garcia’s mentorship, concentrating on asthma and COPD. He then earned his Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021 working in the lab of Dr. Burlingham. In 2021 Dr. Lema joined the Cihakova lab as a postdoctoral fellow, where he researched immune therapeutics targeting inflammatory cytokines in myocarditis.
Diego is currently (2023) an internal medicine resident at Jefferson Health/ Einstein in Philadelphia.
Alexis Choi
September 2021-June 2022
Alexis Choi is a current undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University with a major in Public Health Studies and a minor in Spanish for the Professions. Her work in the Čiháková lab was focused on the tissue-resident memory cells and its role in subsequent inflammation and autoimmune diseases, such as myocarditis.
Alexis is currently perusing her undergraduate degree and hopes to continue research in the future.
Megan Kay Wood, BS
Received her PhD June 2022
Megan Wood received her B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Arkansas. Her honors thesis focused on synthesizing short 11-15mer peptides, rich in arginine and tryptophan and looking at their antimicrobial activity against bacteria. Following her degree, she worked as a research technician in Wayne Yokoyama’s immunology and pathology laboratory at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. From 2015-2017 she joined the United States Peace Corps and moved to Ghana, West Africa where she worked intimately with nurses and mothers in combating malnourishment and malaria prevention in children under 5. Megan was a student in the department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, where she joined the Cihakova lab. She studied the role of viral infections in the development of myocarditis and complications in the heart after viral clearance. Megan Wood recently graduated from the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology program at the school of public health system.
Megan is currently a Senior Scientist at AbbVie Pharmaceuticals, Greater Boston Area.
Vitali Rusinkevich MD, M.S., Ph.D.
Postdoctoral fellow February 2020-June 2022
Dr. Rusinkevich received his MD degree (2005) from the Belarusian State Medical University and completed the internship at the Minsk Regional Clinical Hospital (2006) being specialized in Intensive Care & Anesthesiology. In 2011 Dr. Rusinkevich obtained Master’s Degree in Surgery from the School of Medicine of Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a major specialization in Cardiac Surgery Intensive Care. After several years of work as a cardiac surgery ICU physician, Dr. Rusinkevich have decided to devote himself to a scientific path and started his Ph.D. program in the laboratory of Molecular Cardiology of professor Yang Huang-Tian at The Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences. In 2018 Dr. Rusinkevich obtained his Ph.D. degree in Cell Biology. In his research, he focused on cardiology and immunology. During his Ph.D. degree, he studied the immune response in myocardial infarction. After graduation, Dr. Rusinkevich has served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dr. Kay Wagner lab in The Institute of Biology Valrose, INSERM (Nice, France), where he studied the role of transcription factor WT-1 on cardiac angiogenesis and inflammation following myocardial infarction. Dr. Rusinkevich joined the Cihakova lab from February of 2020 starting several projects related to immune aspects of myocardial infarction and aortic aneurism.
Currently Vitali is a trainee at CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia).
Paul Delgado
Received her MS June 2021
Paul received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Oklahoma in May 2018. She then completed her Master of Science in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in May 2020. During her time at JHSPH, she also earned a certificate in Tropical Medicine and a certificate in Health Disparities and Health Inequalities. In the Čiháková lab, she studied the protective role of pericardial macrophages and their efferocytosis potential during experimental CVB3 myocarditis.
Paul is currently pursuing her DO degree at Oklahoma State University College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Daniela Bresciani Padilla
Received her BA May 2020
Daniela Bresciani Padilla obtained her B.A. in Public Health Studies degree from Johns Hopkins University, May 2020. She also obtained a concentration in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. Daniela joined the Čiháková Lab in 2018 and she has been studying self-antigens present in different salivary gland cell populations and their role in the development of Sjӧgren’s Syndrome.
Daniela is currently pursuing an MD degree at the University of Puerto Rico Medical School.
HeeSun Choi, PhD
Received her PhD January 2020
Hee Sun was born and grew up in Seoul, South Korea. She earned her B.S. and M.S. in Biotechnology from Yonsei University in South Korea. To pursue a Ph.D, she joined the Pathobiology Graduate Program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In the Cihakova lab, she worked on elucidating the role of innate lymphoid cells in the development of pericarditis and the role of immune cells and cardiac resident cells in the pathogenesis of pericarditis. HeeSun received her Ph.D. in August 201, and stayed on as a postdoctoral fellow until November 2019.
Currently HeeSun is a post doctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Kuchroo at Brigham Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
William Bracamonte-Baran, MD, PhD
Postdoctoral fellow 2015-June 2019
Dr. Bracamonte-Baran earned his MD degree (2004) and completed the Internal Medicine residency (2008) at the Central University of Venezuela. Then started a tenure as Assistant Professor in the same
University with appointments in the Department of Physiology and Internal Medicine, dedicating his clinical practice and basic research to diagnostic medicine, autoimmune diseases, biomathematics and cardiovascular physiology. In 2011 moved to Madison, Wisconsin, earning his PhD on Immunology (2015) at the University of Wisconsin, focusing on transplant immunology, making novel insights on the tolerogenic impact of allogeneic-derived exosomes, reprogramming of dendritic cells and exosome-dependent induction of energy mediated by PDL1/PD1 axis. Since October 2015 he is working in the Department of Pathology (Division of Immunology) at Johns Hopkins University (Dr. Daniela Čiháková’s lab) focusing on the study of heart-resident innate lymphoid cells and its role in autoimmunity and inflammatory heart diseases.
Dr. Bracamonte-Baran finished medical residency in Odessa, Texas, USA, in 2021. He was an internist in Midland, TX specializing in internal medicine (adult medicine) and currently he is a clinical fellow at Yale School of Medicine.
Xuezhou (Snow) Hou, BS
Received her PhD January 2019
Xuezhou (Snow) Hou grew up in Shanghai, China before earning her B.S. in Biology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She then spent a year working on a Bill & Melinda Gates foundation project at QIAGEN, developing multiplex isothermal helicase-dependent DNA amplification assays for point-of-care STI detection in resource limited areas. She later joined Dr. David Fredricks’ group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, studying the roles of bacterial vaginosis associated bacteria in the development of pelvic inflammatory diseases. As an O’Leary Wilson predoctoral fellow PhD student in the Čiháková laboratory, Snow is currently studying the roles of monocytes and macrophages in the development of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCMi), a sequelae of myocarditis that often results in debilitating outcomes in human patients.
Dr. Hou is currently Senior Scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb.
Guobao (Paul) Chen, PhD
Postdoctoral fellow 2015-2018
Guobao earned his B.S. in Life sciences (Molecular Cell Biology concentration) from National University of Singapore, Singapore. He continued to pursue a Ph.D. from National University of Singapore Immunology Program in the laboratory of Professor Jinhua Lu on the gene transcription control of C1q, the recognition component of the complement system. His work led to the discovery of the molecular mechanism behind the synchronized expression of the three subunit genes of C1q through a central regulatory cis-element. In Cihakova lab, Guobao is currently investigating the role of cardiac fibroblasts in post-cardiac injury inflammation and remodeling process through two cardiac injury mouse model: the experimental autoimmune myocarditis mouse model and myocardial infarction mouse model.
Dr. Chen is currently Senior Scientist I, autoimmunity at AbbVie Pharmaceuticals, Greater Boston Area.
Nicola Diny, MS
Received her Ph.D. May 2017
Nicola received her Bachelor’s degree in Biomedicine and Biotechnology from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Austria in 2008. She then completed the master’s program in Molecular Medicine at the Charité Berlin in Germany. In Dr. Antje Voigt’s laboratory at the Charité, Nicola studied the protective role of the interferon-stimulated gene 15 (ISG15) in Coxsackie virus B3-induced myocarditis. Since 2011, Nicola has been pursuing her PhD in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. She studies the role of eosinophils in autoimmune myocarditis and in the progression to dilated cardiomyopathy, as well as the pathways that are involved in eosinophil trafficking to the heart.
Dr. Diny did a Post Doctoral Fellow at The Francis Crick Institute, London, England. Currently Dr. Diny is a Junior Research Group Leader at University of Bonn, Germany.
Jobert Barin, PhD
Research Associate 2012-2016
Jobert received his Ph.D. degree in Immunology at Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, Department of pathology, where he continued as a Post Doctoral Fellow and quickly became Research Associate. His interest was in complex integration of cytokine networks in the development of myocarditis, heart disease and mucosal immunity.
Dr. Barin is currently employed at the FDA as a Senior Staff Fellow in the CDRH.