Full Member
Stephanie Vargas Aguilar
Membership since:
2025
Field of activity:
About me
I am a postdoctoral fellow at UT Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, United States, where I investigate the immune mechanisms that enable heart regeneration. I was born and raised in Ecuador and earned my undergraduate degree in Molecular Medicine from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany, followed by a Ph.D. in Immunology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. I combine expertise in immunology, developmental biology, and regenerative medicine to uncover how immune regulation shapes tissue regeneration.
Degrees:
2018
Doctorate Structural, Cell and Molecular Biology
My title is in the subject of Biology / Immunology
2012
Undergraduate Medical and Health Sciences incl Neurosciences
Publications resulting from Research
Vargas Aguilar, S, Cui, M, Tan, W, Sanchez-Ortiz, E, Bassel-Duby, R, Liu, N, and Olson, EN. The PD-1–PD-L1 pathway maintains an immunosuppressive environment essential for neonatal heart regeneration. Nat. Cardiovasc. Res. 2024 Mar; 10.1038/s44161-024-00447-7.
Gainullina, A, Sergushichev A, Artyomov MH, ImmGen Consortium. Resource Network analysis of large-scale ImmGen and Tabula Muris datasets highlights metabolic diversity of tissue mononuclear phagocytes Cell Rep. 2023 Feb 28;42(2):112046. PMID: 36708514.
Subramanian S, Busch CJ, Molawi K, Geirsdottir L, Maurizio J, Vargas Aguilar S, Belahbib H, Gimenez G, Yuda RAA, Burkon M, Favret J, Gholamhosseinian Najjar S, de Laval B, Kandalla PK, Sarrazin S, Alexopoulou L, Sieweke MH. Long-term culture-expanded alveolar macrophages restore their full epigenetic identity after transfer in vivo. Nature Immunology. 2022 Mar;23(3):458-468. PMID: 35210623.
Vargas Aguilar S. (as part of the ImmGen Consortium) The Immunological Genome Project. ImmGen at 15. Nature Immunology. 2020 Jul;21(7):700-703. PMID: 32577013
Imperatore F, Maurizio J, Vargas Aguilar S, Busch CJ, Favret J, Kowenz-Leutz E, Cathou W, Gentek R, Perrin P, Leutz A, Berruyer C, Sieweke MH. SIRT1 regulates macrophage self-renewal. EMBO Journal. 2017 Aug 15;36(16):2353-2372. PMID: 28701484
Matcovitch-Natan O, Winter DR, Giladi A, Vargas Aguilar S, Spinrad A, Sarrazin S, Ben-Yehuda H, David E, Zelada González F, Perrin P, Keren-Shaul H, Gury M, Lara-Astaiso D, Thaiss CA, Cohen M, Bahar Halpern K, Baruch K, Deczkowska A, Lorenzo-Vivas E, Itzkovitz S, Elinav E, Sieweke MH, Schwartz M, Amit I. Microglia development follows a stepwise program to regulate brain homeostasis. Science. 2016 Aug 19;353(6301):aad8670. PMID: 27338705.
Dennemärker J, Lohmüller T, Müller S, Vargas Aguilar S, Tobin DJ, Peters C, Reinheckel T. Impaired turnover of autophagolysosomes in cathepsin L deficiency. Biological Chemistry. 2010 Aug;391(8):913-22. PMID: 20536383.