Production Crew

About Jon

Jon leads the scientific direction of the Piganelli Lab and has built his research program around a central question: why does the immune system lose tolerance to the insulin-producing beta cell, and where can that process be interrupted?

His research spans T cell-mediated beta cell destruction, redox signaling, oxidative stress, immunometabolism, beta cell stress, and therapeutic strategies aimed at slowing or preventing type 1 diabetes. That broad background allows projects in the lab to move between molecular mechanisms, cellular immunology, animal models, and translational questions.

As the lab's “Executive Producer,” Jon connects those different projects into the larger scientific story. He is heavily involved in experimental brainstorming, grant writing, mentoring, collaborations, and finding ways to turn unexpected results into the next research question.

Outside the formal science, Jon helps give the lab much of its personality. Classic rock and golden-oldies playlists regularly make their way into the lab, discussions can easily detour into astrophysics, and lab members frequently acquire memorable nicknames along the way.

About Roy

Roy brings together a broad scientific background spanning parasitology, host-pathogen biology, immunology, autoimmune disease, and translational biomarker research. That range is especially valuable when a project sits at the intersection of infection, cellular stress, and immune activation.

In the Piganelli Lab, his work focuses on early immune events associated with type 1 diabetes, including beta cell stress, viral influences on autoimmunity, neoantigen formation, autoreactive T cell responses, and biomarkers that may identify disease-associated immune activation before clinical diabetes develops.

A major part of his current work includes soluble LAG-3 as a potential indicator of early T cell activation. His projects bridge mechanistic mouse studies with human translational samples, helping connect laboratory observations with questions relevant to disease progression.

Roy is known for technical persistence, thoughtful experimental design, and a strong eye for how complex data can be organized and communicated clearly.

About Megan

Megan is a PhD student studying some of the earliest immune changes that occur during the development of type 1 diabetes. Her research asks how autoreactive CD4+ T cells become activated, how their antigen-reactivity patterns evolve over time, and whether those early events leave measurable signals that can be detected before overt disease.

Her work combines spontaneous and adoptive-transfer mouse models with antigen-specific tetramer analysis, multiparameter flow cytometry, beta cell stress measurements, soluble biomarkers, and human translational samples. A central focus of her research is soluble LAG-3 as a potential marker of an early window of T cell activation.

Megan is also interested in antigen diversification and the relationship between beta cell stress and expanding autoreactive T cell responses. Her projects are designed around following disease longitudinally rather than looking only at its final clinical endpoint.

Beyond the bench, she contributes to figure and poster design, scientific writing, website development, lab organization, and outreach projects that make the lab's science more accessible.

About Sajid

Sajid brings a physical-chemistry perspective to a laboratory rooted in immunology. Before joining the Piganelli Lab, his research focused on soft materials, self-assembled surfactant and polymer systems, fluorescence spectroscopy, Förster resonance energy transfer, and photoluminescent materials.

His scientific path later expanded into functional materials and molecular imaging, including work involving organic mixed conductors and photochemical strategies for generating imaging contrast. That background gives him a toolkit for thinking about biological systems through molecular interactions, optical measurements, material behavior, and quantitative physical chemistry.

In the Piganelli Lab, Sajid applies that interdisciplinary experience to biological and disease-focused questions, bringing approaches and ways of thinking developed in chemistry and materials science into a biomedical research environment.

His linked Research Portfolio highlights the chemistry, fluorescence, soft-matter, and imaging research that shaped his scientific background before and alongside his current work in the lab.

About Virginie

Virginie helps turn the lab's experimental plans into the day-to-day work that makes the research possible. She supports laboratory operations, experimental workflows, sample processing, and ongoing studies in immunology, type 1 diabetes, and beta cell stress.

Research laboratories depend on consistency behind the scenes just as much as they depend on the experiments that eventually appear in figures and papers. Virginie's work contributes that consistency through careful technical support, organization, preparation, and assistance across multiple projects.

As a Laboratory Production Coordinator, she helps keep experiments and laboratory logistics moving together across the many samples, assays, animals, and timelines active in the lab.

About Karly

Karly supports the experimental foundation of the Piganelli Lab through daily laboratory operations, sample handling, experimental preparation, and research support across projects studying immune activation, beta cell stress, and autoimmune diabetes.

Her role places her at the point where experimental design becomes practical execution. Careful sample organization, reproducible workflows, and reliable technical support are critical to keeping longitudinal and multi-step research projects moving forward.

As a Laboratory Production Coordinator, Karly helps make sure the many moving pieces behind a research project are ready when the science needs them.