Andrea Graham
Andrea L. Graham is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, where she has been a faculty member since 2009. She is also affiliated with the Center for Health & Well-Being and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton and holds an External Faculty position at the Santa Fe Institute. Graham earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University.
Graham is an evolutionary ecologist with strong interests in the processes that drive heterogeneity in hosts, parasites, and diseases. Her lab aims to understand how natural selection has shaped strategies for both host defense and parasite transmission. They are especially interested in discovering why hosts are so heterogeneous in immune responsiveness. Their laboratory methods will be familiar to immunologists, but their questions as well as our quantitative methods are drawn from evolutionary ecology.
Of the myriad molecules that power the mammalian immune system, their favorites are cytokines and antibodies. Cytokines are intercellular signalling molecules that determine the type and magnitude of parasite-killing mechanisms enabled; antibodies are among the most potent and specific of those mechanisms. Thanks to excellent recent graduate alumnae, they study defense mechanisms of insect hosts, too. They assess effects of strong responses upon both host and parasite fitness, and the selection pressures that shape speed and specificity of responses.
Throughout her career, Graham has received numerous accolades, including being elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and being named a Fellow by the Kavli Foundation and U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She has also held prestigious fellowships, such as the David Phillips Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.
