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"

Gregory Golden

Postdoctoral Fellow
"To be named"

Vincent Wu

PhD Candidate
​"Coder"

Kyabeth Torres-Rodriguez

PhD Candidate
"Candy Queen"

Jacob Hamilton

Research Technician
"Star Baker"

Josetta Adams

VMD/PhD Student
"To be named"

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:
  • Characterization of immunopathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease and response to vaccination
  • 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 16 papers and presented in 7 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, particularly looking at SARS-CoV-2 specific T-cell responses.
• She has authored/co-authored 3 papers and presented in 3 conferences.

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

Gregory Golden

• Greg is our newest addition to the lab! He is a postdoctoral researcher who joined in 2021 and is interested in T cell immunology in the context of Type 1 Diabetes. He is also a huge proponent of skiing and disc golf.​

​
TBA

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 using single-cell technologies to help identify/phenotype HIV-infected cells during ART. 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.
• He has authored/co-authored on 4 papers and has been selected for oral presentations in 2 conferences.

​​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 focuses on the the mechanisms by which oncogenes induce immune evasion and T cell dysfunction in cancer
  

​kyabeth [at] pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Jacob Hamilton

• 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

Josetta Adams

• Josetta is originally from New York City. She received a B.S in Biology from The City College of New York and a M.S in Infectious Disease and Global Health from Tufts University. She intends to pursue a research career in industry or academia and hopes to one day be a part of a biotech startup. In her free time, Josetta enjoys reading, meditation, and tending to her house plants.​

jpadams [at] vet.upenn.edu

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Former lab members

​Post-doctoral fellows
Alberto Japp (Captain T Cell at the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine)
Marcus Buggert (Assistant Professor, Karolinska Institutet)
Morgan Reuter-Monslow (Associate Principal Scientist, Merck, Inc.)
George Makedonas (JES Tech, Houston, TX)
Laura McLane (Staff Scientist, University of Rochester)
Lamorris Loftin (Associate Director, Albany Molecular Research, Inc., Raleigh NC)
Nur Rahman (Principal Scientist, Caprion Biosciences, Toronto, CA)

Graduate students
Son Nguyen (Post-doc @ Shalek Lab, MIT)
Jamie Knox (Post-doc @ Luning-Prak Lab, University of Pennsylvania)
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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