Rachel R Caspi

Biography

Dr. Rachel Caspi received her doctoral training in Israel and her postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, USA. She is a tenured Senior Investigator at NIH and serves as a Section Head of the Immuoregulation Section and Chief of the Laboratory of Immunology, National Eye Institute, NIH. She also holds an Adjunct Professorship at the University of Pennsylvannia School of Medicine. Dr. Caspi's research centers on tolerance and autoimmunity to immunologically privileged retinal antigens in animal models of autoimmune uveitis, a potentially blinding human disease. She developed the mouse model uveitis, now in use worldwide. Her studies have elucidated many basic mechanisms of pathogenesis and helped to devise clinically relevant immunotherapeutic approaches. She is particularly well known for her work on effector and regulatory T cells in pathogenesis of ocular autoimmunity. The work she and her group have published is broadly applicable to autoimmunity in general. She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, most recent of which was the 2010 Friedenwald award, one of the two highest awards in the field of vision research, and has authored and co-authored >200 publications.

Research Interest

Vision research and Ocular autoimmunity