Janelle C. Arthur PhD

Janelle C. Arthur, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. A native of the Boston area, Dr. Arthur received her undergraduate degree in Biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. She then moved to North Carolina to pursue her Ph.D. in Immunology and Microbiology at UNC with Dr. Jenny Ting. Supported by an NIH NIAID T32 pre-doctoral fellowship, Dr. Arthur identified an important role for a newly discovered intracellular innate immunity protein, NLRP12, in controlling immune cell migration.

During her transition to postdoctoral research, Dr. Arthur joined the Department of Medicine under the direction of Dr. Christian Jobin, where she was funded by a postdoctoral NIH NIDDK T32 fellowship and an American Cancer Society fellowship. Here she became fascinated with the newly appreciated gut microbiota and its role in intestinal inflammation and colorectal cancer. This field was in its infancy, ripe with unanswered questions, and had the potential to become a novel therapeutic target for both systemic and digestive diseases. Dr. Arthur’s research revealed that chronic intestinal inflammation induces an expansion of resident bacteria with specific cancer-promoting activities. Dr. Arthur further developed her independent research with mentoring from Dr. R. Balfour Sartor and joined the UNC Microbiology & Immunology department as faculty in 2015.