Edward John Wherry III


Edward John Wherry III is an American immunologist. He is the Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President's Distinguished Professor and department chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the Penn Institute for Immunology and Immune Health.

Education

Wherry received his B.S. degree in science from The Pennsylvania State University in 1993 and his Ph.D. in immunology from Thomas Jefferson University in 2000. He completed his thesis on the effect of epitope density on CD8+ cell priming under the mentorship of Laurence "Ike" Eisenlohr.

Academic posts

Wherry continued on to a postdoctoral fellowship with Rafi Ahmed at Emory University from 2000 to 2004. After completing his postdoc, he joined The Wistar Institute as an assistant professor where he remained until 2010. He then joined the department of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. He served as the chair of the Immunology Graduate Group from 2011 to 2013 and remains on the IGG Executive Committee. In 2012 he was appointed as director of the Institute for Immunology. Wherry was named the inaugural Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President's Distinguished Professor in 2017. A year later, Wherry was appointed as chair of the Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics department. Dr. Wherry co-leads the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Penn and is the Director of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn as well as the Colton Consortium that also includes centers at New York University, Yale University, and Tel Aviv University.

Research

Wherry's research has focused on the field of T cell exhaustion, elucidating mechanisms that attenuate T cell responses during chronic infections and cancer. He helped identify the role of the immunological checkpoints molecule PD-1 and others for reinvigoration of exhausted T cells in cancer. Dr. Wherry’s work has defined the underlying molecular and epigenetic mechanisms of exhausted T cells and studies from his group have delineated the developmental biology and lineage relationships of exhausted T cells. His laboratory has also focused on applying systems immunology approaches to define Immune Health patients across a spectrum of diseases, including an emphasis on the pharmacodynamic responses of immune cells and immune pathways following therapeutic interventions.

Awards and honors