Lab Team
Meet the people of the Mark Davis Lab
The Davis Lab Team
Dr. Mark M. Davis is the Director of the Stanford Institute for Immunology, Transplantation and Infection (ITI), a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He later was a postdoctoral fellow and staff fellow at the Laboratory of Immunology at NIH and later became a faculty member in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he remains today. Dr. Davis is well known for identifying many of the T-cell receptor genes, which are responsible for the ability of these cells to recognize a diverse repertoire of antigens. Other work in his laboratory pioneered studies of the biochemistry, genetics and cell biology of these molecules and T lymphocytes generally, which play a key role in orchestrating immune responses. His current research focuses on obtaining a “systems level” understanding of the human immune system. This has involved the steady state and vaccine responses of old and young subjects, as well as a recent study of twins, which concluded the variation in most immune system parameters is not driven by inherited variation, but rather by environmental factors.