January 23, 2024
Welcome new Assistant Professor Autumn York!
We are very pleased to welcome our newest Assistant Professor, Autumn York, PhD!
Autumn earned her PhD in Molecular and Medical Pharmacology from UCLA in 2016 under the supervision of Steven Bensinger, then went on to complete postdoctoral training in Richard Flavell’s lab at Yale. In 2017, she was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna H. Gray Fellow.
Autumn has a record of highly innovative and impactful publications, both as a grad student and as a postdoc. Autumn has a long-standing interest in how inflammatory signals impact immune cell lipid metabolism and vice versa. During her PhD, Autumn’s research demonstrated crosstalk between type 1 interferons and cholesterol biosynthesis, revealing a key metabolic-inflammatory circuit (Cell 2015). In follow-up studies, she found that various TLR signaling cascades can reorganize immune cell lipid species (Cell Met 2020). As a postdoc, Autumn’s work further explored the “immunological lipidome” where she found that IL-10, a multi-faceted anti-inflammatory cytokine, can reprogram innate immune cell sphingolipid metabolism to promote resolution of inflammation (accepted at Nature, 2024; partial pre-print available at BioRxiv). You can check out Autumn’s complete publication record on PubMed.
Autumn’s lab will interrogate how lipids convey messages to immune regulatory components as either direct messengers or via protein modifications. She plans to explore the therapeutic potential of these interactions for both inflammatory and neurological diseases.
Autumn also has significant mentorship, DEI and community outreach experience. In the Flavell lab, she mentored two PhD students and an undergraduate student, and provided support and expertise to other PhD students and postdocs, especially during the fellowship application process. She has a long history of leadership and engagement with DEI initiatives, including STEM programs for middle school students and partnership with an organization that supported homeless high school students.
We could not be more excited to welcome Autumn to our community! Her lab and office are on the fifth floor of Building E; drop by E563 and say hi next time you’re in the neighborhood. You can also reach her by email at agyork@uw.edu.