Bio:

Harinder Singh obtained his Ph.D. at Northwestern University mentored by Dr. Lawrence Dumas (1979-84) and was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral fellow at MIT mentored by Drs. Phillip Sharp and David Baltimore (1984-88). He was a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago from 1989-2009, becoming a Louis Block Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In January 2019, Harinder accepted a position as the Director at the Center for Systems Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh. He previously served as Senior Director of Discovery Immunology and as a Staff Scientist at Genentech from 2009-2013. From 2013-2018, he was on the faculty of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center as Director of the Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology. He has served as an Editor of the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Biology and as a Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors (Basic Research) of the National Cancer Institute.

He has had a longstanding interest in the analysis of transcription factors and gene regulatory networks that regulate the development and functioning of innate and adaptive cells of the immune system. His lab discovered that the Ets family member PU.1 is required for the development of multiple lineages of the innate and adaptive immune system and that graded levels of PU.1 are used to orchestrate innate versus adaptive immune cell fates. The Singh lab has been particularly interested in gene regulatory networks that orchestrate B cell fate specification, pre-B cell differentiation, B cell activation and plasma cell generation. Molecular biology and genomic approaches along with mathematical modeling have been used to assemble and analyze such networks. This conceptual and experimental framework is being extended to enable analysis of antigen-specific B as well as T cell responses in the context of vaccination, infection or autoimmune diseases in humans.