Donna Farber, is the George H. Humphreys, II Professor of Surgical Sciences (in Surgery), and professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is also a principal investigator at the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology and chief of the Division of Surgical Sciences.
Farber’s research for the past 22 years is focused on immunological memory, and recently, on how the immune response is compartmentalized in tissue sites in mouse infection models and in humans. Farber’s laboratory identified subsets of tissue-resident memory T cells in the lung that mediate protective immunity to respiratory virus infection and has led an initiative in translational immunology to dissect human immune responses in tissues throughout the body, in multiple mucosal and lymphoid tissues from individual organ donors of all ages.
Farber received her undergraduate degree in Microbiology from the University of Michigan, her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and did postdoctoral training in the Section of Immunobiology at Yale University and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. Farber is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association of Immunologists, American Society of Transplantation, and Clinical Immunology Society.