Michael Birnbaum is an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical and physical biology from Harvard University and his PhD from Stanford University. At Stanford, he worked under K. Christopher Garcia, and studied the molecular mechanisms of T cell receptor recognition, cross-reactivity, and activation. After postdoctoral work in Carla Shatz’s group at Stanford supported by a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship, Birnbaum joined the faculties of MIT and the Koch Institute in 2016. During his tenure at the Koch Institute, Birnbaum has received the AACR-TESARO Career Development Award for Immuno-oncology Research, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a Pew-Stewart Scholarship for Cancer Research, a V Scholar Grant from the Jimmy V Foundation, the Michelson Prize for Human Immunology and Vaccine Research, and the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator Award. In October 2020, he received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) New Innovators Award. He is a co-founder of Viralogic Therapeutics and Abata Therapeutics, and is an advisor for both.

Talks

• Engineering a pseudotyped lentiviral platform to enable lineage-specific transduction of immune cells
• Perfusion-based microbioreactors for production of CAR T cell therapies