Lesley De Armas, Ph.D.

I was born and raised in Fairfax, VA and graduated from the University of Virginia in 2003 with a BSc in Biology. My scientific career began during undergraduate school in the lab of David Camerini and focused on HIV pathogenesis. My work was involved in generating cell lines that expressed the co-receptors for HIV infection, CCR5 and CXCR4 which I later obtained a patent for.

Following graduation, I continued in the HIV research field and worked for 3 years as a research associate first at University of California Irvine with David Camerini and then at University of Miami with Savita Pahwa, where I first became interested in Immunology.

I was accepted into the PhD program in the Microbiology and Immunology Department at University of Miami in 2006 and joined the lab of Eckhard Podack. My PhD project was to characterize the expression pattern and anti-bacterial function of a novel pore-forming protein, Perforin2 expressed in macrophages. Dr. Podack was well-known for his research discovering other pore-forming proteins (i.e. perforin, complement C9) in the immune system and this was an exciting area of research in his lab.

I received my PhD in 2013, and returned to Savita Pahwa’s lab as a post-doctoral fellow. During my post-doc, my focus was on HIV immunology in the context of Aging. We studied the immune response to influenza vaccination in aging (>60) people living with HIV in comparison to HIV-negative and younger individuals to dissect immune dysfunction related to biological aging and chronic viral infection. We used high-dimensional data acquisition and analysis tools to identify immune biomarkers of vaccine response in this cohort.

In 2020, I became Research Assistant Professor and pivoted my focus in Dr. Pahwa’s lab to the study of the infant immune system following perinatal exposure to HIV. This research involves participation in a few large international collaborations focusing on pediatric HIV infection and Cure strategies.

My current research is focused on pediatric immunology in the context of perinatal HIV infection or exposure and is divided into 2 main projects. The first is to identify immunologic biomarkers of HIV reservoir size in HIV+ infants. For this objective, we have a collaboration with a clinic in Mozambique Africa that has enrolled a longitudinal cohort of perinatally infected infants and HIV exposed uninfected infants. We are investigating phenotype and function of innate and adaptive immune cells using multiparameter flow cytometry (>28 colors), single cell RNA Seq in PBMC to assess transcriptional pathways and signatures, and virological measurements to assess HIV reservoir size and composition. This study will allow us to address the affect of HIV infection on the developing immune system (including response to routine childhood vaccinations) as well as evaluate anti-HIV immunity in infants in the context of early ART initiation and prolonged viral suppression.

The second project is studying the impact of latent TB infection during pregnancy in HIV-infected mothers on infant immune responses to TB and BCG vaccination. Co-infection of TB and HIV is common in areas where both pathogens are endemic such as India and Africa. Using blood samples from the IMPAACT clinical trials network, we are investigating whether infants born to mothers with latent TB infection are sensitized in utero against TB antigens and how this affects the infant’s immune response to BCG vaccination and protection from acquiring TB during infancy. To address these questions, we will analyze maternal and infant samples to characterize immune phenotype and function including cellular subset distribution, plasma biomarkers, and gene expression.