Faculty & Scientific Staff

Christine Bender, PhD, is a translational immunologist specializing in type 1 diabetes (T1D). She received her PhD in biological sciences from Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 2016, where she investigated the role of the chemokine CXCL10 in islet transplantation and autoimmune diabetes under the mentorship of Prof. Urs Christen in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

Following her doctoral training, Dr. Bender joined the La Jolla Institute for Immunology as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Matthias von Herrath. There, she studied antigen-specific CD8 T cells in the human pancreas from donors with and without T1D, leveraging advanced imaging approaches to better understand immune-mediated mechanisms of disease development and progression. Her work contributed to a first-author publication in Science Advances and strengthened our understanding of autoreactive T-cell responses in human T1D.

In 2021, Dr. Bender joined the Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle as a senior postdoctoral research associate and was promoted to staff scientist in 2023. Her current research focuses on integrating clinical trial samples with high-dimensional immune profiling and clinical data analysis to identify biomarkers of disease progression and therapeutic response in T1D. She has led studies characterizing ex vivo expanded regulatory T-cell therapies using flow cytometry and transcriptomic approaches, resulting in a first-author publication in Science Translational Medicine. Her research aims to identify immune mechanisms and biomarkers associated with disease progression and treatment response in T1D.