Dr. Merisa L. Piper is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who specializes in breast reconstruction and general reconstruction, with expertise in all methods. With the goal of restoring appearance after partial or complete breast removal, she focuses particularly on microsurgery and free tissue transfer, using skin, fat and muscle from another part of the body.

Cancer, fundamentally, is a disease of disordered gene expression. Cancer cells rely on deregulated expression of oncogenic and tumor suppressive pathways to initiate and maintain the transformation process. Thus, delineating how cancer cells achieve such pathologic gene expression states is a crucial step towards understanding and ultimately treating cancer as a disease.

Professor Dean’s research involves in vitro and bioinformatic approaches along with studies of human populations to address host-pathogen interactions, including bacterial genomics, host immune responses and microbiota/microbiome/metabolome associations with disease protection and pathogenesis related to the obligate intracellular bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis. Her group was the first to identify genomic recombination in this human pathogen. The Dean lab also studies the evolution of zoonotic chlamydial species.

The goal of my research is to identify factors that influence the initiation of effective immune responses to HBV in the liver. Currently, my focus is on understanding the role of the liver as a site of immune priming to hepatotropic pathogens and the influence of commensal bacteria on the liver priming environment. I am also very interested visualizing of immune structures in the liver by immunofluorescent staining of liver tissue.