HYM Lab

Visualizing Immunity as It Happens

Understanding how immune cells sense, move, and respond to physical injury or infection is fundamental to both basic immunology and the development of new therapeutics. Our laboratory uses two-photon intravital imaging together with tissue clearing techniques for whole-organ 3D reconstruction to capture the morphology and motility of immune cells in real time. Rather than relying solely on static, end-point measurements, we watch immune responses unfold directly within living tissue — from the brain and lung to the intestine, skin, liver, and beyond — using live mouse models and custom-built imaging windows for each organ.

Immune Cell Trafficking at Sites of Injury and Infection

A central question in our work is how immune cells are recruited to, and navigate within, damaged or infected tissue. By directly observing the tissue microenvironment as inflammation unfolds, we resolve the sequence, timing, and spatial coordination with which different immune cell populations arrive at and move through affected sites. These observations form the basis for dissecting the cellular and molecular logic underlying innate and adaptive immune coordination during inflammation, and how disruptions in this coordination contribute to disease.

From Images to Mechanisms

Imaging alone tells us what is happening; to understand why, we integrate our intravital imaging data with functional and molecular analyses of immune cells, revealing mechanisms that are difficult to capture through either approach alone. By connecting cell behavior observed in living tissue to the underlying signaling and metabolic pathways, we aim to identify the molecular mechanisms that drive immune cell recruitment, activation, and dysfunction, and how these processes shape tissue damage, repair, or disease progression. 

Immune Dysfunction in Disease

We are also interested in how immune cell function becomes disrupted by environmental and endogenous triggers, and how this dysfunction contributes to disease beyond the site of the initial insult. Our work has shown that environmental particulates, such as microplastics, can impair the normal function of immune cells like macrophages and neutrophils, contributing to processes ranging from tumor progression to immune cell death. We have also shown that innate immune activation can compromise protective tissue barriers and drive immune cell infiltration into organs such as the brain, linking local immune activation to broader tissue damage. Together, these findings illustrate a guiding theme of our research: immune cell dysfunction, whether triggered by environmental exposure or inflammatory signaling, can drive tissue damage and disease across organs. 

Research Focus

Our ongoing research centers on three areas: intercellular communication between immune cells during bacterial and viral infection, the development of diagnostic biomarkers for inflammatory diseases, and the continued advancement of high-resolution imaging techniques for studying immunity. Across these efforts, our long-term goal is to translate a mechanistic, real-time understanding of leukocyte migration and inflammation into better diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for inflammatory and infectious disease.