Dr. Haining is a physician-scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. The focus of the Haining laboratory is understanding the regulation of T cell exhaustion, and functional genomic approaches to identifying mechanisms of immune evasion in cancer. His work has defined some of the key transcriptional and epigenetic regulators of T cell exhaustion using systems immunology. Ongoing studies in his lab aim to comprehensively map the transcriptional "circuits" and epigenetic programs that guide the differentiation of naive T cells into functional effector and memory T cells, and identify how they are altered in cancer and chronic viral infection. The long-term goal of these studies is to identify how to engineer the T cell response to improve cancer immunotherapy and vaccines.