Prof. Carmen Gerlach
Head of Research Division | Tailored T-Cell Diversity
Carmen Gerlach has been dedicated to understanding diversification within CD8+ T cell responses for 20 years. She pioneered lineage tracing technology for fate mapping of individual naive T cells, giving insights into the inter- and intra-clonal heterogeneity of CD8+ T cell responses. Using this technology, she demonstrated that while individual T cell clones produce functionally diverse progeny, robustness of T cell responses is provided by averaging highly divergent behaviors of individual T cell clones (Gerlach et al. J Exp Med 2010, Gerlach & Rohr et al. Science 2013). Carmen Gerlach furthermore delineated a subset of memory CD8+ T cells with unique migratory and homeostatic properties (Gerlach & Moseman & Loughhead et al. Immunity 2016). These studies have substantially shaped our current understanding of T cell clonal fates and revised our view on how individual memory CD8+ T cells migrate through the body.
Recent work of the Gerlach lab has focused on bridging murine and human immunology to facilitate cross-species translation of findings – something that had been difficult since it had long been unclear how murine central memory (TCM) and effector memory (TEM) relate to human TCM, TEM and TEMRA subsets. The Gerlach lab showed that graded expression of the chemokine receptor CX3CR1 marks differentiation states of human and murine T cells and enables cross-species interpretation. CX3CR1 measurements are an easy-to-use strategy to obtain fine-graded information on T cell functional and migratory capacities that is applicable to both murine and human CD4+ and CD8+ T cells and identifies cells of the same properties in both species (Zwijnenburg et al. Immunity 2023, Pokharel & Shryki et al Eur J Immunol 2024).
Currently, the lab is conceptualizing new ways to study T cell diversification and is dedicated to improving T cell-based immunomonitoring and immunotherapy.
Quote from Prof. Carmen Gerlach
T cell responses are enormously diverse. Even among T cells responding to the same antigen, different T cells have a range of different specialized roles in the response. Understanding how and when T cells adopt these different roles paves the way for influencing T cell fates in the context of immunotherapy.
Head of Research Division Tailored T-Cell Diversity
Biography
Academic background and qualifications
Carmen Gerlach holds a Bachelor and Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences from Leiden University in Leiden, the Netherlands. She performed her doctoral training under supervision of Ton Schumacher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, graduating with a PhD in 2012.
Professional career
Carmen Gerlach performed her postdoctoral research (2011-2017) under supervision of Ulrich von Andrian at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, and spent 8 months as Visiting Scholar in Nir Yosef’s lab at the University of California Berkeley, USA, to gain insights into computational immunology. She started her independent lab end 2017 as Assistant Professor at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, where she became Principal Researcher in 2022. In 2025, she was recruited as W3 Professor to the University of Regensburg and the LIT, where she heads the Research Group T-cell diversity.
Honors
Carmen Gerlach has received several prizes and honors throughout her career, including Wallenberg Academy Fellow grants (2024, 2017), a Junior Investigator Award from the Swedish Cancer Society (2020), Ragnar Söderberg Fellowship (2017), Cancer Research Institute (CRI) Irvington postdoctoral fellowship (2013), Rubicon postdoctoral fellowship by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (2011), and several prices at the German youth research competition Jugend Forscht and Schüler Experimentieren.
Explore our Research Division in greater depth
Get to know our team and find out more about our pioneering research.