Infectious disease physician-scientist with a focused on unbiased diagnostics and developing treatments for uncommon infections.

My Research Interests are divided into 3 areas of focus:

1. Supportive Care (especially Invasive Fungal Infections) following Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation
2. Transplantation for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency
3. Transplantation for Rare Leukemias (JMML and APL)

Kelsey H. Collins, PhD completed her undergraduate work in Exercise Biology at University of California, Davis, and earned her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at University of Calgary under the direction of Dr. Walter Herzog. During her postdoctoral studies in the Guilak Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, she created a tissue engineering and regenerative medicine platform to determine the signaling mechanisms between adipose and musculoskeletal tissues.

I am a physician-scientist with an interest in airway epithelial dysfunction in asthma. Specifically, my lab focuses on understanding how genetic risk variants that are associated with asthma at a population level, actually confer risk of disease at a molecular level. We use novel techniques such as conditionally reprogrammed primary airway epithelial cells, CRISPR gene deletion, and biospecimens from large numbers of human subjects to discover the function of genes associated with asthma and elucidate the causal single nucleotide polymorphism.

The Gardner lab studies fundamental mechanisms of immune tolerance -- how the immune system learns to distinguish self from non-self -- and how this understanding can be applied in the context of autoimmunity, transplantation, maternal-fetal tolerance, and cancer immunology.