Meet our lab!

We're always looking for more people to join our lab.
Interested undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows should contact us to learn more.

Scroll down to learn more about what we each do!

Mike Betts

Professor
​"Boss"

Jay Gardner

Lab Manager
​"The Dad of the floor"

Lety Kuri-Cervantes

Sr Research Investigator
"Flow and sort guru"

Maria Betina Pampena

Postdoctoral Fellow
"Peptide Queen"

Son Nguyen

Graduate Student
"The flow master"

Vincent Wu

Graduate Student
​"The coder"

Kyabeth Torres-Rodriguez

Graduate Student
"To be named"

Jacob Hamilton

Research Technician
"To be named as well"

You!

​Contact us to learn more.

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What do we do?

Mike Betts

• Mike earned his PhD in 1998 from the University of North Carolina in Dr. Jeffrey Frelinger’s lab working on human T cell responses to HIV. He continued this work during his postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Rick Koup at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and then at the NIH Vaccine Research Center. In 2005 he started his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he continues to research the immune response to HIV and other viral infections in humans, most recently working on COVID-19. He maintains active collaborations in Latin America, Europe, and Africa, where he is involved in both immunology research studies and training of new investigators.
• CAMB Microbiology, Virology, and Parasitology (MVP) graduate group chair.
• ​The writer of grants.
• 9th place in our 2019 Fantasy Football league.

​​betts [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu​

Jay Gardner

• Jay has been the lab manager since the beginning of time. He has many titles and names but he is most commonly known as:
  • the "Dad" of the floor
  • the liaison to vendors
  • the maintainer of reagents
  • the speaker of Ficoll and...
  • the keeper of the riches.​​
  • ​He is Jay Gardner.

​stewartg [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu​​​

Leticia (Lety) Kuri-Cervantes

• Lety started as a post-doc in the lab and has recently become a staff scientist. Her main interest is T-cell immunology in HIV/SIV infection. The lab's ‘flow and sort guru’. Her main projects are:
  • Study of follicular helper T cell dynamics in acute SIV infection
  • Identification of the origin of peripheral blood virus in SIV and HIV infection
  • Characterization of Tfh and Tfr responses to influenza vaccination in young and elderly individuals.
• ​She’s involved in numerous collaborations and is the liaison with collaborators in Mexico.
• Lead researcher on the SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 front for the lab
• In her 3 years here, she’s authored/co-authored 7 papers and presented in 6 conferences.

​
​​​kuri [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Maria Betina Pampena

• Betina is a postdoctoral researcher who joined in 2019 and is interested in understanding viral immunity in humans and nonhuman primates in the settings of HIV/SIV infection. Her main project consists on developing immunological strategies to modulate Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) rebound following anti-retroviral treatment interruption.​
• Currently involved in SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 research, specifically looking at the innate immune cell landscape as well as SARS-CoV-2 specific T-cell responses.

​
maria.pampena [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Son Nguyen

• Son has been a graduate student in the lab since 2014. He is interested in the biology of CD8+ T cells in humans. His project focuses on understanding how CD8+ T cells control HIV replication in lymphoid tissues of elite controllers. He has also picked up an interest in bioinformatics, which enables him to form many collaborations both internally at Penn and internationally.
• In his 5 years here, he's authored/co-authored 9 papers and presented in 4 conferences.

sonn [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Vincent Wu

• Vincent has been a graduate student in the lab since 2018. He is interested in HIV integration in tissue compartments as well as CD8+ T-cell functionality in the lymphoid environment. His interests also include bioinformatics research in increasing the "-omics" approach to HIV immunology - bringing RNAseq, ATACseq, and CITEseq analyses to our lab interests at bulk or single-cell resolutions.
• In his 2 years here, he's authored/co-authored on 1 paper and presented in 1 conference.

​​wuv [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Kyabeth Torres-Rodriguez

• Kyabeth is a graduate student in the Cancer Biology program at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her B.S. in Microbiology at the University of Puerto Rico-Humacao and joined the Betts lab in the Summer of 2019. Her thesis work will focus on the study of the mechanisms of immune evasion and T cell dysfunction in cancer.

​Kyabeth.Torres-Rodriguez​ [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Jacob Hamilton

• Jake is our newest addition to the lab as a research technician!
• He graduated from Penn State in 2016 with a BS in Biology investigating the role environment plays in the neural development of common side-blotched lizards. He then went on to graduate from Drexel with an MS in Molecular and Cell Biology and Genetics investigating the role of Chtf18, the DNA replication protein, in sister chromatid cohesion and post-replicative genome maintenance in mice.
  

Jacob.Hamilton [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu

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Former lab members

​Post-doctoral fellows
Alberto Japp
Marcus Buggert
Morgan Reuter-Monslow
George Makedonas
Laura McLane
Lamorris Loftin
Nur Rahman

Graduate students
Jamie Knox
Emily Roberts
Korey Demers
Carolina Pombo
Irene Bukh
Danielle Haney
​Natalie Hutnick
Adam Hersperger 

Technicians/research specialists
Heidi Gunzelman
Diane Carnathan
Gabriela Cosma
Alexandra Amick
​Sally Yuan

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