Dr. Pillai did her Ph.D. in Immunobiology at Yale Univ. in the lab of Prof. Akiko Iwasaki. Featured in her first-authored Science paper & a Nature Reviews Immunology article, her research is the first to identify excessive inflammation as the reason flu infection is more deadly in elderly patients than in younger adults, & suggests a new potential strategy for combating the flu in susceptible individuals by blocking an inflammatory pathway in the lung. Inspired to apply her expertise to building new tools to treat disease, Dr. Pillai came to work Prof. Robert Langer at MIT to develop biomaterial & nucleic acid strategies to boost anti-tumor immunity & treat chronic inflammatory diseases. In 2016, she received the CRI Irvington postdoctoral