Valeria M. Juarez
BME PhD Defense Presentation

Date: 2026-09-28
Time: 11:00 AM-1:00 PM
Location / Meeting Link: EBB Krone CHOA Seminar Room / https://tinyurl.com/ValeriaPhDDefense / Join Zoom Meeting https://emory.zoom.us/j/96915851555?pwd=DXbDgWjXmjARbKeAD6UGLIovqFlpzS.1 Meeting ID: 969 1585 1555 Passcode: 144494

Committee Members:
Ankur Singh, PhD (Advisor) Andrés J. García, PhD Ahmet Coskun, PhD David Myers, PhD Michael H. Woodworth, MD, MSc, FIDSA


Title: Bioengineering Human Immune Niches Across Scales to Model Gut-Lymphoid Crosstalk and B Cell Responses

Abstract:
A critical challenge in immunology is understanding how the intestinal environment communicates with the immune system to shape human immune responses in health and inflammatory diseases. Conventional in vitro models often study these components in isolation, limiting the ability to capture the complex interactions that occur in humans. This dissertation develops engineered human immune tissue platforms that recreate key features of immune microenvironments across biological scales. An integrated gut–immune microphysiological system was established to investigate communication along the gut–immune axis, inflammation, and therapeutic response. Human immune organoids were developed to define how microbiome-derived bacterial and metabolic signals regulate immune cell function and antibody production. In parallel, degradable biomaterial microenvironments were engineered to examine how local extracellular cues influence immune tissue organization and humoral immunity. These studies establish a modular immunoengineering framework for modeling human immunity and provide new tools to investigate host–microbiome interactions, inflammatory diseases including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), vaccine responses, and therapeutic outcomes in human-relevant systems.