Dr. Laura Santambrogio received her Ph.D. from Padua University and trained as a post-doctoral fellow at NYU and Harvard Medical School with Jack Strominger.  She was recruited at Albert Einstein College of Medicine with an Irene Diamond Professorship in Immunology and recently moved to Weill Cornell where she held the position of Associate Director of Precision Immunology in the Englander Institute of Precision Medicine, Professor of Radiation Oncology, Physiology and Biophysics. Current efforts in her laboratory are focused on the mechanisms of antigen processing and presentation, peptide binding to MHC class II molecules, and the overall role of dendritic cells in innate and adaptive immune responses. She is tackling these questions using an integrated approach that combines cell biology, biochemistry, and biophysics. Important questions addressed by her laboratory relates to the different cellular pathways utilized for antigen processing and presentation which include autophagy, endosomal processing, and surface MHC II loading. Additionally, she is interested in understanding how changes in the cellular transcriptome and metabolome translate in the plasticity of the MHC II immunopeptidome.