Meet the Principal Investigator
Lenette Lu M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Internal Medicine
Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine
Department of Immunology
Lenette was born in Shanghai and grew up in San Francisco.She earned her bachelor’s degree in Swarthmore College’s Honors Program, with a major in biology and minor in Asian studies, studying yeast cell-cycle regulation in the laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Vallen.
She earned her doctoral and medical degrees at Case Western Reserve University, where she studied dsRNA-mediated innate immunity in viral infections under Dr. Ganes Sen. She completed her internal medicine residency at Weill Cornell Medicine and her fellowship in infectious diseases at Partners HealthCare (now Mass General Brigham).
Her postdoctoral research focused on humoral immune responses to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, with Dr. Sarah Fortune at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health and Dr. Galit Alter at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.
Lenette joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 2019. Her lab researches the mechanisms by which antibodies function in infectious diseases and vaccines. She also provides clinical care at Parkland Health & Hospital System.
Current Lab Members
Gabrielle Lessen, B.S.
Graduate Student
Medical Scientist Training Program
Gabrielle earned a B.S. in biochemistry with honors from Texas A&M University, where she studied telomere biology in the lab of Dr. Dorothy Shippen. She is now in her fifth year of UT Southwestern’s Medical Scientist Training Program. Her research focuses on how antibody glycosylation affects IgG-mediated immunity in M. tuberculosis-infected macrophages. She won the 2022 Streilein Award for Best Qualifying Thesis, and is an appointee to the Integrative Immunology T32 training grant.
Pei Lu, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Department of Internal Medicine | Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine
Pei Lu joined Lu Lab as a Research Associate in 2019. She earned a Ph.D in Microbiology at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy Sciences in 2012. She is interested in identifying the antibodies features which involving in tuberculosis control.
Joshua Miles, B.S.
Graduate Student
Immunology
A native of Oregon, Joshua earned his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from George Fox University in Newberg, Ore., becoming the first college graduate in his family. As a research assistant, he studied lipoprotein metabolism and atherosclerosis with Dr. Sergio Fazio at Oregon Health and Science University. In 2020, he joined the Lu lab, where he studies how diabetes uses antibody-mediated processes to alter the body’s ability to control tuberculosis, in both human and murine systems.
Lab Alumni
Justin Greisz
Green Fellow 2020
Medical student
University of Pennsylvania
Perelman School of Medicine
Nabeeha Qazi
Green Fellow 2022
Undergraduate
Biochemistry Major
University of Texas at Dallas
Ye jin Kang
Assistant Instructor 2021 - 2023
Pediatric Infectious Disease Fellow
University of Pennsylvania
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia