Lab Members

E. Ashley Moseman, PhD

Principal Investigator

While Ashley was born in North Carolina, he grew up in the Midwest- spending his formative years in Indiana. His love of Immunology was instilled while earning his BA from Carleton College, Northfield, MN in 2002. He received his PhD in immunology from Harvard in 2011. As a graduate student in Uli von Andrian’s lab, he identified mechanisms by which lymph node resident subcapsular sinus macrophages are specialized to facilitate both innate and adaptive antiviral responses. His soft-spot for lymph nodes has never waned. As a postdoc in Dorian McGavern’s lab at the NINDS, NIH, he addressed the long standing observation that many non-cytopathic viruses fail to generate robust neutralizing antibody responses, demonstrating that IFN-I signaling drives CD8 T cells to engage and kill virally infected LCMV-glycoprotein specific B cells shortly after infection. While in the McGavern lab, he undertook studies to understand the regulation of non-cytopathic viral clearance during central nervous system (CNS) infection via the olfactory route. By observing in vivo interactions he was able to show that T cells interact with microglia to prevent fatal viral neuroninvasion of the CNS. This finding is particularly intriguing because microglia are not infected, but acquire antigen and indirectly orchestrate viral clearance from infected cells.
This project was the impetus for the current lab focus on host-pathogen interactions at the olfactory barrier. We are interested in how the olfactory barrier coordinates innate and adaptive immunity to prevent CNS infections, and how these defenses fail.

Outside of lab, Ashley enjoys all sorts of gardening and recently installed a small apple orchard in his backyard. He can be a colorful character, as his tendency toward making and wearing tie dye would suggest. While a fan of almost all college sports, he is a very serious Indiana University basketball & soccer fan.

Annie was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana home of Indiana University, Go Hoosiers! Despite her love of Bloomington she ventured up north to attend Carleton College and graduated in 2003 with a BA in Biology. After graduation she moved back to Bloomington and worked as a research technician at Indiana University in the laboratory of Ken Nephew working on cancer epigenetics. In 2005 she moved to Boston and worked in the validation lab of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program under the supervision of Isaac Kohane at Harvard Medical School. In 2007 she started her PhD in Immunology at Tufts University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Annie completed her thesis work in Alexander Poltorak’s lab working on the genetics of innate immune TLR9 signaling in wild-derived MOLF/Ei mice in 2012. Annie went on to do her post-doctoral training in the RNA viruses section in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. While working under Lab Chief, Peter Collins, Annie developed and evaluated pre-clinical pediatric RSV vaccine candidates by characterizing their level of attenuation and immunogenicity using both in-vitro and in-vivo models, including the use of human air-liquid interphase respiratory cultures to model RSV infection of the upper respiratory tract.
Annie joined the Moseman lab at Duke in 2018.

Research Scientist

Annie Park Moseman, PhD

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Skye is from Chapel Hill, NC but has always been a blue devil. She graduated from Duke University in 2019 with a degree in Biology and concentration in Neurobiology. During undergrad, she worked in the lab of Jeremy Kay studying cell-cell recognition in the retina. She then stayed at Duke to pursue an MD-PhD, and completed two years of medical school before joining the Immunology PhD program and Moseman lab in January 2022.

Skye Tracey, BS

Graduate Student (MD, PhD candidate)

Alex Merder, BS

Graduate Student (PhD candidate)

Alex grew up and went to college in California (west coast, best coast) before beginning his travels eastward. He was born and raised in Carlsbad, a sunny suburb of San Diego, and then moved a few hours up the coast to attend Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, earning a degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology. After graduating in 2019, he ventured to Indianapolis, where he spent a year as a Research Technician in a lab developing novel mouse models for Alzheimer’s Disease. He then moved to Durham in 2020, spending two years in the lab of Douglas Bell at the NIEHS studying the impact of smoking on T cell function and the TCR repertoire in human subjects. He began his PhD in Immunology at Duke University in the Fall of 2022, before joining the Moseman lab in May 2023.