- Associate Professor, Department of Immunobiology, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University
Dr. Nikhil Joshi is an Associate Professor of Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine and Co-Leader of Cancer Immunology at Yale Cancer Center. His laboratory develops engineered mouse models to study how antigen-specific T cells interpret tissue environments and how these interactions shape immunity, tolerance, autoimmunity, and cancer.
With support from the Colton Center, the Joshi lab established an inducible pancreatic antigen model that allows self-antigen to be activated in pancreatic beta cells and tracked over time. This platform has been used to define how antigen induction in the pancreas activates tissue-specific CD8 T cell responses, how pancreatic draining lymph nodes shape tolerance, and how checkpoint pathways such as PD-1/PD-L1 protect beta cells from immune-mediated damage.
This work has since expanded into a broader effort to understand why some tissues tolerate antigen recognition while others permit destructive immune responses — with implications for type 1 diabetes, immune-related adverse events, and tissue-specific autoimmunity more broadly.
