Maria Pilar Alcaide Alonso PhD

Dr. Alcaide received her PhD in Molecular Biology from Universidad Autonoma of Madrid, Spain, where she studied the immunological aspects of Trypanosoma cruzi infection, the protozoan parasite that causes Chagas disease. As a recipient of a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Alcaide trained in Dr. F.W Luscinskas laboratory in the Brigham and Women’s hospital where she trained in vascular biology and studied the mechanisms regulating immune cell trafficking. After completion of her postdoctoral research training, Dr. Alcaide was appointed to Instructor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and successfully competed for an NIH K99/R00 award while in Dr. Luscinskas lab and later joined the faculty at MCRI in September 2011 to establish her independent research program.

The Alcaide lab is a vascular immunology research team that combines several immunology, vascular biology and cardiac physiology in vitro and in vivo approaches to study several aspects of recruitment of T lymphocytes in diverse inflammatory settings, with a particular focus in the heart in the context of heart failure. The over-arching goal in the lab is to better understand the processes that take place during T lymphocyte recruitment to the heart, both in the T lymphocytes and in the endothelial cells, and how those can potentially be targeted in therapeutically useful ways. Why T lymphocytes? T cell recruitment into tissues is a hallmark of several chronic inflammatory processes. Among T cells, the subset of T helper type 17 (Th17) cells plays a major role in autoimmunity and chronic inflammation, and we found that its interactions with the vascular endothelium differ from other T cell subsets.