September 21, 2020
Dr. John Harty has been awarded the Pathology Endowed Chair in Microbial Immunology Research. John joined the Department of Pathology as a tenured Professor earlier this summer after many years as a faculty member in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
Dr. Harty received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and performed two post-doctoral fellowships on the west coast. The first was at Scripps Research Foundation with Dr. Per Peterson and the second at the University of Washington with Dr. Michael Bevan. In 1993 he moved to the University of Iowa to start his faculty career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology. John was promoted to full Professor in 2003 and held the Mark Stinski Chair in Microbial Immunology from 2010 to 2020.
Dr. Harty is one of the most successful basic scientists on our biomedical campus with almost 200 peer-reviewed publications and a long history of NIH funding. His research program focuses on the role of adaptive immunity in protection against infectious disease. In regards to the immune response, Dr. Harty’s primary interest is the biology of CD8+ T cells. As to infectious diseases, he has studied CD8+ T cell immunity in the context of bacterial (listeria), viral (influenza) and parasitic (malarial) infections. Much of John’s work is published in high impact journals, and covers both basic and translational aspects of the immune response. These journals include Science, Nature, Cell, Immunity, Nature Immunology, Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Experimental Medicine among others. Dr. Harty’s work is highly cited and his h-index score is in excess of 50. In addition, he has maintained a high level of NIH funding throughout his career and is currently PI or co-PI on four R01 grants in addition to an R21 grant and a Gates Foundation subcontract award. Finally, it is important to note that Dr. Harty is a highly collaborative scientist and has published with a range of investigators across the world and at the University of Iowa. This includes a number of faculty in the Department of Pathology.