Dalton Hermans

Dalton graduated with distinction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017 with a degree in Molecular Biology and a certificate in Stem Cell Sciences. During undergraduate at Madison, Dalton worked for four years in the lab of Dr. Bikash Pattnaik where he helped develop a disease model of Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis using induced pluripotent stem cells derived from a patient born with the disorder. Dalton spent his undergraduate summers performing research as part of the Pediatric Oncology Education Program at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. He worked with Dr. Richard Webby and Dr. Paul Thomas, studying adaptive and innate immune responses to influenza virus infection.

After graduating from university in 2017, Dalton joined the lab of Dr. Warren Leonard in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute as a postbaccalaureate IRTA fellow. In Dr. Leonard’s lab, Dalton studied the ability of immune signaling molecules called cytokines to induce disparate metabolic states in CD8+ T cells and described how those metabolic alterations contribute to anti-tumor immunity. This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Dalton entered the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Minnesota Medical School in 2019 and completed two years of medical training before joining the Oxford/Cambridge Scholars program for his PhD. As an NIH-Cambridge scholar, Dalton is mentored by Dr. Robert Seder (NIAID) and John Marioni (Cambridge). His project focuses on the characterization of CD8+ T cells following vaccination with a novel cancer vaccine developed in the Seder lab.

After the completion of his MD and PhD degrees, Dalton aspires to train as a Pediatric Oncologist and work as a physician scientist at an academic medical center.