Members

Meet the members and lab alumni of the Carpenter Lab in the Departments of Medicine and Pathology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Our researchers and trainees seek to better understand immune responses to chronic infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis in particular. 

Meet the Team

Principal Investigator 

Lab Members 

Robert Schauner, PhD

Post-Doctoral Scholar

Robert received his PhD in Immunology from Case Western Reserve University. His PhD work focused on improving methods to predict relapse and cellular metabolism changes in acute myeloid leukemia with a primary focus on pediatrics. He joined the Carpenter lab in 2024 to study CD4 T cell responses to Mtb infected macrophages using his prior experience with data-driven science and single-cell RNA sequencing analysis.

Volodymyr (Vlad) Stetsenko, MD, PhD

Post-Doctoral Scholar

Vlad received his MD and neurology residency training in Ukraine, followed by the completion of a PhD in neuroscience at KSU/Cleveland Clinic. For his PhD, he studied the renewal and localization of CNS-recruited B cells during neurotropic coronavirus infection. He joined the Carpenter Lab in 2023 to study transcriptional profiling of human T-cell responses to Mtb-infected macrophages using single-cell transcriptomics and TCR sequencing.

Daniel Gail

Research Assistant II

Dan Joined the Carpenter Lab in 2021 after graduating from the College of Wooster in 2020 with a BA in biochemistry/molecular biology. Since joining the lab, Gail has helped develop co-culture assays for human memory T cells with autologous, Mtb-infected macrophages from blood and BAL samples. Dan is using flow cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze T cell responses to Mtb- infected cells. 

Nancy Nagy

Research Assistant IV; Lab Manager

Nancy joined the Carpenter Lab in 2022 and assists as the lab manager. Nagy graduated from Notre Dame College with a BS in biology in 1984 and completed training in a medical technology program affiliated with University Hospitals. Her previous experiences include research on animal models of IgA nephropathy as well as investigation of the regulation of APC function in the context of infectious diseases.

Scott Reba

Research Assistant IV

Scott joined the Carpenter Lab in 2024, previously working on TB in Dr. Henry Boom's lab. Scott graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a BA in Biology in 1999. He has previous experience in murine models of host APC and T cell interactions in the context of virulent Mtb aerosol infections. Since joining the lab, Scott has worked to transduce T cells to express Mtb-specific TCRs that were identified from LTBI individuals that responded to infected macrophages. He is currently characterizing the peptide specificity and responses to infected macrophages.

Vinicius G. Suzart

PhD Candidate

Vinicius received his BSc degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil before moving to the U.S. to work as a research assistant at CWRU. Vinicius joined the Biomedical Research Training Program (BSTP) in July 2021 and his previous experiences include research on CAR-T cell therapy, HIV-1, Zika virus, and SARS-CoV-2. His graduate work focuses on applying cutting-edge technology and immunological assays to investigate human CD4 T cell recognition of Mtb-infected macrophages.

Avinaash Kaur Sandhu, MS

PhD Candidate

Avinaash holds a BS in biological sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park and an ScM in molecular microbiology and immunology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her previous research experiences include work with food borne bacterial pathogens and cancer vaccines. Kaur Sandhu joined the Biomedical Sciences Training Program (BSTP) in July 2021. Her graduate work focuses on the TCR repertoire and antigen-specificity of Mtb-specific CD4+ T-cells that recognize infected macrophages.

Lab Alumni

• Weinan Du, MD, PhD
• Michelle Mocadie, MD