Keywords: Immunology, immunometabolism, adipose tissue, obesity, diabetes, weight cycling, macrophages, mast cells, flow cytometry, Seahorse metabolic analysis, ELISA

Heather Caslin, M.S., Ph.D. (She/her/hers)

Postdoctoral Scholar at Vanderbilt University

Heather Caslin, M.S., Ph.D. is in her third year as a postdoctoral scholar in Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University in the lab of Alyssa Hasty. Her current work examines both intrinsic and extrinsic immunometabolism in innate immune cells during weight gain, weight loss, and weight regain. Additionally, she is interested in the role of Th2 immunity in adipose tissue homeostasis. 

Heather received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her Ph.D. work was under the direction of John Ryan where she studied various aspects of mast cell biology. For her dissertation work, she studied how lactic acid and mast cell metabolism influence mast cell function in allergic disease and sepsis. To expand from this work, she began studying the intersection of intrinsic and extrinsic immunometabolism in obesity with a combination of mouse models, cell culture, flow cytometry, and Seahorse metabolic analysis. New work in the lab is expanding to single cell sequencing for population dynamics and ATAC-sequencing for epigenetic analyses.  

Outside of the lab, Heather is involved in many mentoring and outreach initiatives at Vanderbilt and in Nashville, TN, and has recently gotten involved in science communication on Instagram.