Principal Investigator

Professor J. Magarian Blander, Ph.D.

Julie Magarian Blander is an Armenian American immunologist. She received her undergraduate degree in Health Sciences from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and her Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Blander’s graduate thesis work was in tumor immunology with Dr. Olivera Finn as her advisor. Dr. Blander conducted her post-doctoral training in the Section of Immunobiology at Yale University working on Toll-like receptors and innate immunity under the guidance of her mentors Dr. Charles Janeway and Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov. The Blander lab was established in 2006 with the appointment of Dr. Blander as Assistant Professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Blander was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2011, and moved her lab in November 2016 to the Weill Cornell Medical College-Cornell University where she was appointed as an endowed full professor with tenure. Dr. Blander was named Searle Scholar in 2007 and a Burroughs Wellcome Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease in 2011. She was recipient of the 2009 G. Jeanette Thorbecke Society of Leukocyte Biology award. She has received an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar Award, the Arthritis Foundation J. V. Satterfield Arthritis Investigator Award, Weill Cornell Medicine Daedalus Award for Innovation in 2018, Sanofi Innovation Award in 2019, and Weill Cornell Medicine COVID-19 Research Grant in 2020. More recently, Dr. Blander received the 2021 Jeanne and Herbert Siegel Award for Outstanding Medical Research, and the 2022 European Macrophage and Dendritic Cell Society Outstanding Scientific Acheivements Award.

Click here for Dr. Blander’s CV