Heather Hickman, PhD

Heather Hickman received her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2002 where she used mass spectrometry to characterize peptide presentation by MHC class I molecules after viral infection. She next joined the laboratories of Dr. Jon Yewdell and Jack Bennink in Laboratory of Viral Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, where she has continued to analyze the immune response to viruses.  

First as a post-doctoral fellow, and more recently as a staff scientist, Heather has developed an intravital imaging method for visualizing viral infection in vivo.  Much of her work has involved imaging the initial CD8+ T cell response to pox virus infection, which was recently published in Nature Immunology.  Currently, Dr. Hickman has been using a new, dual-photon MP microscope to further characterize both the innate and adaptive response to viral challenge