Arianna Barbetta is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr Emamaullee Transplant Immunology Lab, at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. She received her MD degree in 2015 from University of Pisa (Italy) and relocated to New York in 2016, where she completed a 2-year research fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in the Thoracic Surgery Department, which focused on treatment and outcomes of esophageal cancer patients.
As PhD student first and then as Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr Emamaullee lab, her research has focused on liver transplant immunology to characterize immunological phenotypes associated with allograft rejection in liver transplant recipients, by using single-cell proteomics technologies. Her projects aim to improve the knowledge on the acute rejection pathophysiology (acute T-cell mediated rejection and antibody mediated rejection) in liver transplant recipients, both adults and children, using combination of Imaging Mass Cytometry (IMC), CyTOF and plasma proteomics interweaved with computational biology and machine learning. The identification of new immune cells populations will help to establish biomarker of rejection that can transform the histological and biochemical monitoring of the allograft function. These immune populations can be a target for development of new immunosuppression medications against specific adaptive and/or innate leukocytes subpopulations involved in rejection, ultimately advancing the practice of clinical liver transplantation. She will start her pediatric residency training in June 2026.