Joann Diray Arce, PhD

Instructor at Harvard Medical School

Dr. Joann Diray Arce is a research fellow in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Division of Infectious Diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital. She completed her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She conducted research on the characterization of salt stress response and tolerance in halophytes using transcriptomics and LC-MS/MS proteomics analysis. She also studied mitochondrial DNA replication systems in the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana. Her experience in both advanced molecular biology and bioinformatics have expanded her interests to human systems immunology using big studies. She is the Scientific and Operational Manager of the Data Management Core (DMC) for the Expanded Program on Immunization Consortium-Human Immunology Project Consortium with roles of providing coordination, quality assurance, quality control and analysis of international metadata and systems vaccinology datasets to characterize vaccine-induced OMIC signatures that protect newborns. She has current projects focused on in vitro modeling of age/sex-dependent responses on the metabolic profiles after vaccination. She is also an investigator on the funded HIPC II Signatures Project, a collaboration with multi-institutional HIPC centers with the primary goal of populating the NIAID’s ImmPort database and analyzing datasets with protective vaccine signatures from published literature.