Jeffrey Rathmell, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Rathmell earned his BS from the University of Northern Iowa in Biology followed by his PhD in Immunology from Stanford University. He performed postdoctoral studies at the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania prior to beginning as faculty at Duke University in the Departments of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and of Immunology in 2003. Dr. Rathmell relocated to Vanderbilt in 2015 as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Immunobiology in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology and founding Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Immunobiology. In 2025, he was named the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Chair for Cancer Research Professor where he serves as the Chair of the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and Director of the Ludwig Center at the University of Chicago. Dr. Rathmell is a pioneer in the fields of immunometabolism and cancer metabolism. He showed early in his career that T lymphocyte metabolism is dynamically regulated and plays a critical role to regulate the immune response. His was the first group to show that each T cell subset adopts a specific metabolic program. Dr. Rathmell was twice recognized at Vanderbilt with the Charles Randell Prize Faculty Teaching Award. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was named a scholar of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the Bernard Osher Fellow of the American Asthma Foundation, a William Paul Distinguished Innovator of the Lupus Research Alliance, elected as an Honorary member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and recipient of the Fred W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology from the Cancer Research Institute.