David Zemmour, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator
Assistant Professor of Pathology
Hi! Welcome to the lab! I am a physician-scientist and came to Chicago in the Summer of 2022. I love the city, campus, and community here. I did my MD in Paris, France, at the Pierre and Marie Curie Medical school (now Sorbonne University Medical School). I then moved to Boston to pursue a Ph.D. in Immunology at Harvard. With Drs. Benoist and Mathis, two giants of immunology, my love story with regulatory T cells (Tregs) started. I studied their emerging role beyond controlling autoimmunity in regulating tissue homeostasis. By looking at the locus of FOXP3 closely, I made a fun observation that some reads didn’t map to annotated regions and thus discovered FLICR, a new long-non-coding RNA that controls FOXP3’s expression. My research leveraged novel technologies such as single-cell genomics to understand the transcriptional regulation underlying Treg functions in tissues at the basis of Treg molecular engineering methods to promote homeostasis and prevent diseases (such as wound healing, colitis, and diabetes).
After my Ph.D., my curiosity about disease mechanisms and technology drew me to Pathology. I completed a Clinical Pathology residency and a Hematopathology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital while continuing my work on Tregs. I focused on a rare primary immunodeficiency, IPEX, caused by mutations in FOXP3 that alter Tregs resulting in lethal systemic autoimmunity. Using single-cell genomics, I dissected the molecular mechanism of the disease, i.e., the transcriptional effect of FoxP3 mutations in Tregs, and proposed a two-step pathogenesis model with therapeutic implications.
I am excited to build a community of scientists in the lab, working on T cells, Tregs and I am fascinated by understanding how cells communicate with each other. So simple in appearance but so complex.
Outside the lab, I love spending time with my little family, my badass wife, Chana, an architect, and my children Lea, Naomi, and Raphael. We go to the beach, the museum, and camping. We read, laugh, and live together.
