John Kearney, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Microbiology, is a senior faculty winner of the Dean's Excellence Award in Research.
Kearney completed his Ph.D. studies in immunology at the University of Melbourne, Australia in 1973 and carried out postdoctoral studies at UAB with Drs. Cooper and Lawton on in vitro models of immunoglobulin isotope switching. He joined the Department of Microbiology staff in 1977 and has continued his studies on B cell differentiation. In 1978, he spent a year with Dr. Klaus Rajewsky in Cologne, West Germany where he learned hybridoma technology and also isolated one of the most widely used fusing plasmacytomas. Kearney has since exploited this technique as well as transgenic and knockout mice to dissect out complexities of immune regulation.