Jennifer Puck

Jennifer Puck earned her undergraduate and medical degrees at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, after which she completed clinical and research training in pediatrics, infectious diseases and immunology at Washington University in St. Louis and Baylor College of Medicine. After serving on the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, she joined UC San Francisco in 2006 as professor of pediatrics. In addition to caring for patients as an immunologist and teaching biomedical trainees at all levels, Puck has a basic and translational research program that focuses on human immune disorders as well as mouse models of lymphocyte development. Puck has used genetic and genomic technology as well as cellular immunology to study the basis of impaired lymphocyte development as well as immune dysregulation. She conceived and developed a newborn screening test that uses the universally collected dried blood spots to detect SCID. This testing, now widely adopted in newborn screening panels in the U.S. and a growing number of countries, allows infants affected with SCID and other conditions with insufficient T cells to be diagnosed early and treated.