Distinguished Investigators
Will Bailis
Will Bailis, Ph.D.
Will Bailis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He received his PhD in immunology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied the role of Notch signaling in helper T cell differentiation in the laboratory of Dr. Warren Pear. After graduating, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Richard Flavell at Yale University for his postdoctoral fellowship. During his postdoctoral training, he developed in vitro and in vivo primary immune cell CRISPR screening systems to study how cellular metabolism controls immune cell functional programming. His work demonstrated how distinct modes of mitochondrial metabolism and mitochondrial-cytosolic exchange support the biochemical demands T lymphocytes must meet at a different stages of activation. Now at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Bailis continues to explore how cellular and organismal metabolism govern cell and tissue behavior and how their dysregulation helps explain disease. A major focus of the Bailis lab is to understand how the spatial partitioning of metabolism (between organelles in cells, amongst cells in tissues, and across the organ systems of the body) controls development and function in the immune system, with the goal of developing metabolite- and diet-based therapies.