Laboratory Personnel

Leonard Louis Dragone, MD, PhD

I am interested in the pathogenesis of autoimmunity and how alterations in lymphocyte signaling could lead to disease. I study a family of adaptor proteins that negatively regulate lymphocyte signaling. Src-like adaptor proteins (SLAP and SLAP-2) have sequence similarity to src-family kinases but no intrinsic kinase activity. We hypothesize that these negative regulators are important in determining the level of expression of T-cell receptor (TCR) and B-cell receptor (BCR) on the surface of lymphocytes influencing the strength of signaling via the TCR and BCR. Association of SLAP family members with c-Cbl is intriguing, and implicate them as adaptors of E3-ubiquitin ligase associating with activated components of the TCR and BCR complex and targeting them for internalization and degradation.

email: dragonel@NJHealth.org

Bill Brandenburg

Bill Brandenburg is a 22 year old male from St. Louis, Missouri. He enjoys spending time in the mountains and a good night out with friends.

Meredith Brown

Meredith Brown graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a Bachelors degree in Biochemistry in May 2010. She will be attending the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver starting in August 2011. In the meantime she will be learning immunology at the Dragone lab and will help with investigations into the amelioration of rheumatoid arthritis during pregnancy. 

email: Meredith.Brown@ucdenver.edu 

Lisa K. Peterson, PhD

Post-doc: Lisa K. Peterson obtained her PhD from the University of Utah in the laboratory of Robert S. Fujinami, where she studied the role of MHC, autoantibodies, B1 cells and NKT cells in the development of relapsing remitting and progressive forms of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, an animal model for multiple sclerosis. The overall hypothesis of her post-doctoral studies is that expression of the src-like adaptor protein (SLAP) is necessary to broaden the B cell receptor (BCR) and T cell receptor (TCR) repertoires and that its deficiency will enhance negative selection of autoreactive B and/or T cells and prevent the development of autoimmune disease.  

email: PetersonL@NJHealth.org

Samantha Friend

Samantha Friend received her Bachelors degree from the University of California at San Diego, where she studied the genetic diversity of Black Sea bacteria in order to work at a lab on the beach. She then continued on for a year at UCSD to anthropomorphize T cells in the laboratory of Salvatore Albani. She eventually left the beach for the Colorado Rockies to embrace indecisiveness through an MD/PhD program. She is still working with T cells by playing with mutated intracellular signaling proteins.

email: Samantha.Friend@ucdenver.edu

Andrea Kathleen Vondracek

email: Andrea.Vondracek@ucdenver.edu

Alumni

Samiat Agunbiade 

Samiat Agunbiade is an undergraduate at CU Denver double majoring in Chemistry and French with a minor in History. Her interests are sports and food. Her hobbies are swimming, running and just being with friends and family. She hopes to one day go into either the medical field or sports law, and she is looking forward to this summer in the Dragone lab.

Luke Pennington 

Luke Pennington graduated from Haverford College in 2009 and is spending two years in lab to make up his mind about MD or MD/PhD programs. He escaped from the East coast and is returning home to Colorado to study the role of SLAP in lymphocyte development and regulation in the context of SLE and RA murine disease models.

Dmitri Ryjenkov, PhD

Laura Shaw, Lab Assistant

Matthew Taussig

Graduated with a BA from the University of Denver before deciding that a scientific discipline might suit him better.   While taking the necessary prerequisite courses in order to apply to medical school, he has worked in the lab first as a volunteer and then as a Lab Researcher.

Laura Travers

Laura is an undergraduate at the University of Colorado at Boulder studying Molecular Cellular Developmental Biology (MCDB). She researched protein interactions in a drosophila lab at CU before working at National Jewish Health over the summer through the BURST (Bioscience Undergraduate Research Skills and Training) program. She will be a senior this year and is interested in going to osteopathic medical school after graduation.