Rebecca Howell

Rebecca grew up in Connecticut and attended Bucknell University where she majored in Cell Biology/ Biochemistry.  At Bucknell, she worked in Dr. Charles Clapp’s laboratory using site-directed mutagenesis to probe conformational changes of soybean lipoxygenase.  After graduation, she completed a one-year appointment in the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Dr. Joern Schmitz’s laboratory.  Here she generated stable cell lines expressing soluble and membrane bound Fc receptors to explore differences in therapeutic antibody binding in Rhesus macaques and humans. Next, she joined the Immunology team at Moderna Therapeutics and worked under the guidance of Dr. Gilles Besin for three years developing high-throughput flow cytometry-based screening methods to assess biological interactions of novel delivery and mRNA chemistries.  Her work on the Moderna platform contributed to several drug candidates currently in the clinic.  She began her graduate studies at Yale in Chemical Biology in 2018 and joined the Spiegel lab to work at the interface between chemistry and immunology. In her free time, Rebecca enjoys baking, traveling and playing with her dog.