Susan Kaech

Susan Kaech is director of the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis and holds the NOMIS Chair at the Salk Institution for Biological Sciences.

She is an immunologist who has contributed significantly to the understanding of how long-term immunity forms. Specifically, she helped establish the modern understanding of how and when memory T cells form. Memory T cells are critical for maintaining long-term immunity during acute and chronic infections and can be suppressed in cancer. Kaech identified several genes and signaling molecules critical for memory T cell generation during immune responses. She also helped establish the field of cancer immunometabolism by discovering that the metabolic interplay between tumor and immune cells as well as changes in nutrient availability can lead to metabolic immune suppression in tumors. Her findings have solidified the framework for understanding how memory T cells form during infection and may lead to new therapeutic interventions for cancer in the future. 

Kaech has received numerous awards including a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist award, the National Institutes of Health Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biosciences, and the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fellowship, among others.

Her BS, in Cellular and Molecular Biology, is from the University of Washington and her PhD is in Developmental Biology from Stanford University.