ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2025
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Caitlin C. Zebley, MD, PhD is a physician scientist dedicated to advancing T cell-based immunotherapy for pediatric patients. She is currently an Assistant Member in the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (BMTCT) at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Dr. Zebley received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Iona University and medical degree from Chicago Medical School. She then went on to complete a residency in Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota and a fellowship in Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. After the clinical portion of her fellowship, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin Youngblood in the Department of Immunology at St. Jude and earned a PhD from St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences prior to becoming faculty. Her research focuses on understanding epigenetic mechanisms regulating human memory CD8 T-cell differentiation and applying these insights toward the development of novel cellular immunotherapies. She has developed an epigenetic-based T-cell differentiation atlas that has enabled her and other investigators in the field to perform a broad and universal characterization of T-cell memory differentiation. Her work has highlighted that T-cell exhaustion is a limiting factor of current adoptive T-cell therapy approaches. She has demonstrated that it is possible to overcome these obstacles of exhaustion and engineer T cells with specific epigenetic programs that impart them with disease-relevant long-lived immunological properties. Currently, she is studying mutations that drive clonal hematopoiesis, and is investigating how disruption of these key epigenetic regulators impact T-cell differentiation and could be exploited to enhance adoptive T-cell therapies for pediatric cancer. Dr. Zebley has published her work in high impact journals and her research program is supported by the NIH/NCI (K08) and grants from the National Comprehensive Cancer Center and Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.