Eric Sala Sole

I am undertaking an internship in the Milicic Group at the Jenner Institute as part of the Infection and Immunity MSc at Utrecht University. My project focuses on mechanosensing and how physical forces may contribute to orchestrating immune responses within human lymph nodes. I am supervised by Joannah Fergusson. As part of this work, I helped generate a Xenium spatial transcriptomics dataset of human lymph nodes, which I am currently analysing, and I am establishing a flow-based calcium flux assay to investigate how mechanical stimulation affects immune cell signalling. Ultimately, this work aims to test how pressure affects ex vivo lymph node slices to better model in vivo vaccine responses.

I completed my BSc at University College Roosevelt, where I majored in Life Sciences and Biomedical Sciences. For my Major Research Project, I undertook an internship in the Lab for Germinal Center Biology of Balthasar Heesters, where I established a flexible single-round 14-plex imaging technique and developed a downstream analysis pipeline for spatial proteomics. I am excited to further develop my data analysis skills here and gain additional experience with culturing human tissue and flow-based assays.