Aaruni Khanolkar
Dr. Khanolkar most recently served as the ABMLI-certified Director of the Diagnostic Immunology and Flow Cytometry Laboratory in the Department of Pathology at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago (LCH), the free-standing, pediatric teaching affiliate of Northwestern University. Dr. Khanolkar also held a faculty appointment as an Associate Professor of Pathology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. In his role as the laboratory director Dr. Khanolkar oversaw testing covering the areas of inborn errors of immunity, lymphocyte proliferation analyses, allergy testing, hematologic malignancies, infectious disease serology and autoimmune serology (including indirect immunofluorescence). Additionally, the Diagnostic Immunology and Flow Cytometry Laboratory at LCH was the sole Jeffrey Modell Foundation (JMF) Laboratory for Inborn Errors of Immunity (IEI) in the state of Illinois. To this end the laboratory partnered very closely with the immunology service at the hospital to offer several esoteric cellular immunology phenotyping and functional assays to diagnose and manage IEI patients seen at Lurie Children’s. Dr. Khanolkar is also very actively engaged on the immunology education and research fronts. He is a charter member of the Diplomate in Medical Laboratory Immunology Board of Certification (DMLI-BOC) examination committee that operates under the aegis of the American Society for Clinical Pathology-Board of Certification (ASCP-BOC) (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37639224/). On the research front, he is a microbial immunologist by training and his primary scientific expertise lies in utilizing viruses and bacteria as scientific tools to interrogate the functional fitness of antigen-specific T cells and antigen-specific humoral immune responses to better understand host-pathogen dynamics in both patient samples and pre-clinical models of infection. Moreover, as noted above, over the past decade he has also developed a strong academic interest in IEI, as well as investigating the immunologic underpinnings of pediatric hematologic malignancies. He has led several studies on viral immunology including pediatric human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and IEI that have been published in leading virology and immunology journals.