Lee E. Korshoj, PhD
Assistant Professor, UNMC Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology
Lee E. Korshoj, PhD, is an assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology. He completed undergraduate and graduate training in chemical engineering and applies his cross-field expertise toward the study of host-pathogen interactions.
As a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award recipient, his graduate work coupled sequencing technologies with machine learning and bioinformatics tools for biomarker detection and profiling multidrug-resistant bacteria. As a postdoctoral fellow, he received a National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award to examine the immune responses during infection with the multidrug-resistant bacterium Staphylococcus aureus and how this pathogen uses biofilm formation as a means to subvert host immune defenses.
Dr. Korshoj established his laboratory at UNMC in 2024. His laboratory’s efforts span the fields of molecular biology, immunology and microbiology to understand the mechanisms driving staphylococcal infection severity and persistence, with the goal of identifying novel therapeutic targets and strategies.
- BS: Chemical engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2014.
- PhD: Chemical engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, 2020.
- Postdoctoral Fellowship: Immunology and microbiology, UNMC, 2020-2024.
Dr. Korshoj is interested in characterizing host-pathogen interactions that drive the severity and persistence of Staphylococcus aureus infections. Efforts toward the host seek to define the function of innate immune receptors that sense and respond to the complex landscape of pathogen and damage signals at the site of infection. With respect to the pathogen, his laboratory has a special interest in optimizing and applying emerging capabilities in prokaryotic single-cell transcriptomics to understand the signals underlying biofilm formation and how this lifestyle shift facilitates immune evasion.
- Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health, 2022.
- Sanofi Award for outstanding translationally focused postdoctoral fellow, American Society for Neurochemistry, 2021.
- Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award, National Science Foundation, 2017.
- Top Presentation Award, Soft Materials Research Center Science Slam, University of Colorado Boulder, 2017.
- Chancellor’s Scholar, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2014.
- Amgen Scholar, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.
- American Association of Immunologists
- American Society for Neurochemistry
- American Society for Microbiology