Stephen McSorley Honored with Zoetis Research Award

Dr. Stephen McSorley, professor in the Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Cell Biology, was honored with the 2023 Zoetis Award for Research Excellence. McSorley earned a B.Sc. (Immunology, 1992) and Ph.D. (Immunology, 1995) from Glasgow University in Scotland and has held previous professorial positions at the University of Connecticut Health Center and University of Minnesota.

McSorley has a very strong extramurally funded and productive research program focused on developing immunological tools to study the immune response to bacterial infection. He strives to bridge the fields of bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology by incorporating the complexity of the pathogen’s biology with state-of-the-art analysis of innate and adaptive immune responses. 

He uses mouse models of Salmonella and Chlamydia infection to understand the roles of CD4 memory T-cells in the immune response to infection. CD4 T cells are generated to help fight infection and do so in partnership with other immune responses such as antibody production by B cells. When the infection is over, some of these T cells, which are specific to the pathogen, are retained and reside in the liver as tissue resident memory (TRM) T cells. It is thought that these tissue resident cells are critical for effective protection against subsequent infection, but vaccines typically generate circulating memory cells rather than these more effective tissue resident cells. His research is focused on understanding how TRMs are generated and to use this knowledge to develop more efficacious vaccines.

McSorley has published more than 105 Journal articles in a variety of high impact journals including the Journal of Immunology, Nature, Immunology, and Nature Immunology. He has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for 20 years and currently holds two active NIH R01s and an NIH R21. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and in 2017 was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This was a notable honor as select AAAS Fellows are elected annually by the AAAS Council and are recognized for their extraordinary achievements across disciplines including research. For 12 years he served as Associate Editor for Mucosal Immunology and Executive Editor for Immunology Letters. He has also served as an NIH reviewer since 2006.