Connie Sommers, Ph.D.

Dr. Connie Sommers obtained her Ph.D. in anatomy and cell biology from the Georgetown University School of Medicine. She pioneered the concept of EMT (epithelial-mesenchymal transition) in breast cancer during her time at the NCI Medicine Branch and at Georgetown University. She transitioned to studying developmental immunology in 1994 at NICHD and was a Staff Scientist at NCI for 17 years as an expert on genetic mouse modeling to study T cell signaling. Dr. Sommers joined the IOB in 2017, where she uses her backgrounds in cancer research and in basic immunology. Her programmatic research interests include: checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy, adoptive cellular immunotherapies, preclinical models of immunotherapy, canine immunotherapy, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and combination cancer therapies.