Member Spotlight - Isabella Rauch, PhD

Dr. Rauch is an Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Oregon Health and Science University. She received her Doctorate (PhD) from the University of Salzburg in Austria, where she studied antimicrobial neuropeptides in the skin. She worked on interferons in intestinal inflammation and inflammasome mediated gastrointestinal pathogen defense in her postdoctoral research at the University of Vienna and during an Erwin-Schrödinger postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. She received the Austrian scientists and scholars in the northern Americas award and the UC Berkeley outstanding postdoc award for her work showing rapid epithelial cell extrusion upon cytosolic pathogen detection by inflammasomes. Dr. Rauch started her own independent lab focusing on epithelial responses to pathogen infection in 2019. Their research uses genetic mouse models of in vivo infection as well as stem cell derived organoids as primary epithelial cell in vitro models to answer the following questions: What are the signals downstream of inflammasome activation that lead to epithelial cell extrusion? Which inflammasome sensors do intestinal epithelial cells functionally express, is there mouse- human differences? Are certain pathogens capable of suppressing this response with effector molecules? What are the consequences? What is the role of inflammasomes in tuft cells, a specialized type of epithelial cell?