Awarded in 2026
Home Department: Immunology, Medicine
Faculty Advisors: Sean Bendall (Pathology), Nathan Reticker-Flynn (Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery), Mark Davis (Microbiology & Immunology), and Andrew Gentles (Pathology and Medicine – Computational Medicine)

Research Title: Tissue-Specific Cues Modulate Lymphocyte Function Across the Body

Immune cells transit through every organ in the body. Despite knowing that microenvironmental context drastically alters immune cell function, we understand little about how organ-specific factors alter lymphocytes in situ. Humza proposes to combine organoid modeling and other mechanistic experimental systems with advanced epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic approaches to identify tissue-specific immune cell states.