Martha Milton Sklavos
Year started program: 2004
Program name: Immunology
2001 - BA, German, Johns Hopkins University

If you can’t find something that excites you here, you never will. The graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh offers a broad range of biomedical research to its students while helping them to discover where they fit in. The three rotations help a first year student gain exposure, learn new techniques and narrow down the field of research that will become their focus. Pitt’s graduate program is a welcoming environment which initially offers a panoramic view of science instead of forcing a student to pigeon-hole themselves early on in their education. On numerous occasions faculty and other students go out of their way to help you in any way they can. Pitt exemplifies research as a team effort while boasting leading investigators and the latest technology to keep Pitt on top of its game. On another level, Pittsburgh is a great place to be. As a native of the city I can say that there has been significant development in the past 5-10 years. Expanding shopping, dining, sporting events, theater, museums, outdoor adventure, and nightlife are all captured by this multicultural city. Additionally, graduate students experience an increased quality of life in an affordable city.

Even though my lab focuses on diabetes, it has a broad scope. My main project concerns allograft immunity and transplantation using mouse models. Lifelong immunosuppression presents a new struggle for transplant patients as global immunosuppression often leads to undesirable and life-threatening complications including cancer and chronic infection. In an effort to ease the taxing requirement of lifelong immunosuppression in transplantation my experiments strive to categorize a modulatory role for a nontoxic potent catalytic antioxidant (CA) in transplantation. Largely, organ transplants are allogeneic (from a donor other than the recipient) and T cell mediated rejection of the foreign tissue necessitates immunosuppression to conrol the immune response, which recruits primed immune cells to secrete pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, that destroys the graft. We have previously demonstrated that CA quells the inflammatory response and now design experiments to demonstrate the ability of CA to induce alloantigen hyporesponsiveness (to specifically prevent rejection without global immunosuppression).

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