Kaitlyn Sadtler

Investigator

NIH/NIBAB

Dr. Kaitlyn Sadtler is a scientist and Chief of the Section on Immuno-Engineering at the National Institutes of Health. She began her lab at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Chemical Engineering working on the molecular mechanisms of immune activation in the foreign body response. She completed her Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she showed a critical role for immune cells in biomaterial-mediated muscle regeneration. Her research has been published in journals such as Science, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, and Science Translational Medicine. She was recognized as a TED Fellow and delivered a TED talk that was listed as one of the top-viewed talks of 2018. Dr. Sadtler was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 List in Science, the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Program, and the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders. She also received Outstanding Recent Graduate Award from Johns Hopkins University and an honorary doctorate from her undergraduate university, UMBC. Since starting her laboratory at the NIH, Dr. Sadtler has lent her lab’s expertise to the fight against COVID-19, launching the NIH Serologic Survey, detecting 16.8 million undiagnosed SARS-CoV-2 infections in the US via remote blood sampling and antibody testing, for which she was awarded a two NIH Director’s Awards for scientific achievement and mentoring. She continues her work on immunoengineering in the context of traumatic injury focusing on the balance of tolerance and autoimmunity during tissue reconstruction.