Associate Investigator, Vitalant Research Institute; Adjunct Associate Professor, USCF
Vitalant Research Institute
San Fransisco, California
Dr. Rachael Jackman, Ph.D. is an Associate Investigator at Vitalant Research Institute (VRI) in San Francisco and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Laboratory Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her long-term research goals are to improve our understanding of the wide range of immune consequences to allogeneic exposure and to identify methods to modulate these responses to protect against alloimmunization and rejection. Dr. Jackman did her undergraduate training at the University of California at Berkeley in Molecular and Cellular Biology, and her graduate training at Yale University in Immunobiology. Her dissertation work examined how different subsets of T helper cells communicate with antigen presenting cells through differential organization of the immunological synapse, and how this is regulated by expression of costimulatory molecules. She then did her postdoc at VRI (formerly Blood Systems Research Institute) in Transfusion Immunology, initially focused on human immunology with a particular interest in HLA alloimmunization, tolerance, and immunomodulation caused by traumatic injury and pathogen reduction, and soon began to complement this work with animal models. Over the last 17 years, she has successfully developed and worked with novel murine models of trauma, blood transfusion, pathogen reduction, chemotherapy, and infection and their impact on immune responsiveness and alloimmunization. She has also continued to work with clinical samples studying the regulation of alloimmunization resulting from transfusion or other exposures such as pregnancy, and how these outcomes are influenced by underlying disease, differences in blood products, and clinical intervention.
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AM26-MO-16-L - Understanding Models of Transfusion Medicine
Monday, October 19, 2026
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST