Ragon Institute 
Mariano Aufiero, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, has received a CRI Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Cancer Research Institute.
The Irvington fellowship is one of the leading early-career awards in cancer immunology. It provides three years of support, mentorship, and professional development to postdoctoral scientists studying how the immune system recognizes and responds to cancer, and connects awardees to an international network of researchers in immunology and immunotherapy.
Aufiero’s funded project, “Defining and Harnessing Dectin-1-Mediated Signaling in Tumor Immunity,” centers on Dectin-1, a receptor on the surface of immune cells that is best known for detecting fungi. When Dectin-1 binds its target, it triggers a cascade of signals that tell the immune system how to respond. Researchers are increasingly interested in whether that same sensing machinery shapes how immune cells read tumors. Aufiero will work to map those signals in detail and test whether they can be redirected to make cancer immunotherapies more effective.
Aufiero is co-mentored by Eric Dang, PhD, and Charlie Evavold, PhD. The Dang Lab broadly studies the molecular and cellular interactions between fungi and their hosts, while the Evavold Lab studies how cells decide between different fates, using cell death programs as a model system.
Aufiero earned his PhD at the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, where his dissertation work examined how myeloid cells defend the body against fungal infection. The fellowship supports the next phase of that work at Ragon, extending questions about innate immune sensing into the setting of cancer.