- Presidential Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Cornelius Taabazuing is a Presidential Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He received his BS and PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and completed postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the laboratory of Daniel Bachovchin, where he investigated the biochemistry of inflammasome activation and inflammatory programmed cell death.
The Taabazuing laboratory studies the molecular mechanisms that regulate pyroptosis, apoptosis, and inflammasome assembly — pathways central to innate immune defense whose dysregulation drives monogenic autoinflammatory syndromes and contributes to a wide range of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. His group combines protein biochemistry, structural studies, and CRISPR-based screens in primary cells to identify novel inflammasome regulators and to define how cell-death decisions are made.
Dr. Taabazuing’s work is supported by an NIH K99/R00 award and by Penn institutional investments in mechanistic immunology. He is a member of the Penn Colton Center, the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health, and the Penn Center for Genome Integrity, where his mechanistic discoveries on inflammasome biology inform translational efforts to target innate immune pathways in autoimmune and autoinflammatory disease.
