E. John Wherry, PhD
Chair, Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President's Distinguished Professor Director, Institute for Immunology & Immune Health (I3H) Director, Colton Center for Autoimmunity, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. E. John Wherry is the Barbara and Richard Schiffrin President’s Distinguished Professor, Chair of the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine and Director of the UPenn Institute for Immunology and Immune Health (I3H). He is also the leader of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn, which joins centers at NYU, Yale and Tel Aviv to for the Colton Consortium and transform the landscape of autoimmune health. Dr. Wherry received his Ph.D. at Thomas Jefferson University in 2000 and performed postdoctoral research at Emory University from 2000-2004. Dr. Wherry has received numerous honors including the Distinguished Alumni award from the Thomas Jefferson University, the Cancer Research Institute’s Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology, the Stanley N. Cohen Biomedical Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, was inducted as an AAAS Fellow in 2021, was awarded the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology in 2022, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023 and Elected as a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2024. As of January 2024, Dr. Wherry has over 330 publications, an H-Index of 132, and his publications have been cited over 100,000 times.
Dr. Wherry helped pioneer the field of T cell exhaustion, which studies the mechanisms by which T cell responses are attenuated during chronic infections and cancer. He helped identify the role of the “checkpoint” 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. His laboratory has also recently focused on applying systems immunology approaches to define Immune Health in patients across a spectrum of diseases. In 2020-2021, Dr. Wherry’s laboratory focused considerable efforts on the immunology of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, including establishing a new Immune Health Project to interrogate and use immune features to identify novel treatment opportunities.
