Julia Carnevale MD

Dr. Carnevale earned her MD at Harvard Medical School and then completed an internal medicine residency and oncology fellowship at UCSF. She did her postdoctoral training in the labs of Alan Ashworth and Alex Marson. Her initial postdoctoral work established a new screening strategy that allowed for the first time, genome-wide CRISPR screening in primary human T cells. She subsequently used this screening platform to identify key regulators of T cell activation and proliferation, work that nominated a number of genes as engineering targets to boost cell therapies. She went on to model various immunosuppressive conditions found in the tumor microenvironment to identify genes that regulate sensitivity/resistance to these suppressive factors. Results from this work led to her focus on RASA2 as a previously unrecognized negative regulator of T cell function. She showed that ablation of RASA2 can enhance T cell activity and long-term effector function. She is now starting her own laboratory focused on using targeted gene engineering to enhance next-generation cell therapies.