Ramin Herati
New York University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Vaccines do not protect everyone. Between 2 and 10% of vaccinations in healthy people fail to produce protective immunity.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
hepatitis B vaccine
vaccine response
vaccine non-response
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Track circulating T follicular helper (cTfh) cells and B cells across repeated hepatitis B vaccine doses, profiling their traits and receptor repertoires to find which features best predict the final protective antibody level.
- Compare people receiving adjuvanted versus traditional hepatitis B vaccine, using multi-modality single-cell profiling to see how the adjuvant, an immune-boosting ingredient, changes cTfh and B cell responses.
- Test how obesity-related chronic inflammation weakens the vaccine response by taking lymph node biopsies and imaging many immune markers at once with multiplex immunofluorescence.
More about the research
For the hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccine, 10–30% of people with obesity, a long-lasting inflammatory state, make weak antibody responses even after several doses, leaving them unprotected. Obesity is becoming more common worldwide. Learning why some people respond poorly to vaccines, and predicting who they are early, could guide better vaccine design.
Why it matters
People with obesity and other chronic inflammatory states are often left unprotected by hepatitis B vaccination. By finding immune features that predict a weak response early, this work could help identify people who need different vaccination strategies. It could also point to mechanisms that future vaccine designs, including choice of adjuvant, can address.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katsuo Kurabayashi
New York University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Build a microfluidic human Lymph node-on-a-Chip that recreates the node's key compartments (paracortex, follicle, subcapsular sinus, lymphatic and blood vessels) with continuous flow of lymph-like fluid.
Vijayakumar Velu
Emory University, GA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test how soluble IL-15/IL-15Rα-Fc, an immune-boosting cytokine complex, and galunisertib, a TGF-β pathway blocker, alone or combined, change T cell and natural killer cell subsets during chronic SIV infection in antiretroviral-treated rhesus macaques.
Stefan Feske
New York University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how calcium signals through CRAC channels activate the Ets family transcription factor Fli1, and how Fli1 controls the development of T follicular helper cells, the T cells that help B cells make antibodies.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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