ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2022

Samuel Weinberg, MD, PhD, is a Chicago native who completed his MD and PhD degrees in 2019 as a member of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Medical Scientist Training Program. He did his PhD work in the laboratory of Dr. Navdeep Chandel where his studies primarily focused on the role of mitochondrial metabolism in immune and stem cell function and as a potential target for cancer therapy. Specifically, this work demonstrated the importance of TCA cycle metabolites as novel regulators of hematopoietic stem cell differentiation and regulatory T cell function. Currently, Dr. Weinberg is a resident physician focusing on clinical pathology as well as a research fellow in the Physician-Scientist Training Program in the Department of Pathology at the McGaw Medical Center at Northwestern University. Going forward Dr. Weinberg is building off his PhD and is continuing to investigate how environmental metabolites and immune cell-intrinsic metabolic pathways causally impact the generation of protective immune responses in multiple disease contexts by leveraging a combination of clinically relevant animal models of viral infection, vaccination, and tumor development, rigorous mouse genetics, immune cell samples derived from patients with inborn errors of metabolism and metabolic syndrome, and a unique liquid-chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS) metabolomics pipeline to identify causal metabolic pathways that could be used to alter adaptive immune function. Ultimately, he hopes to explore the early metabolic disruptions experienced by antigen presenting cells during infection, vaccination and malignancy to elucidate if these changes may underlie the development and progression of pneumonia and malignant processes with an ultimate goal of identify prognostic biomarkers and modifiable metabolic pathways to target in these conditions.