E. JOHN WHERRY, PHD
Dr. E. John Wherry is the Barbara and Richard Schiffrin President’s Distinguished Professor, Chair of the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine and Director of the UPenn Institute for Immunology and Immune Health (I3H). He is also the leader of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn, which joins centers at NYU, Yale and Tel Aviv to form the Colton Consortium and transform the landscape of autoimmune health. Dr. Wherry received his Ph.D. at Thomas Jefferson University in 2000 and performed postdoctoral research at Emory University from 2000 to 2004. Dr. Wherry has received numerous honors including the Distinguished Alumni award from the Thomas Jefferson University, the Cancer Research Institute’s Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology, the Stanley N. Cohen Biomedical Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, was inducted as an AAAS Fellow in 2021, was awarded the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology in 2022, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023, Elected as a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2024, elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2024 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2025. As of May 2025, Dr. Wherry has over 357 publications, an H-Index of 145, and his publications have been cited over 115,000 times.
Dr. Wherry helped pioneer the field of T cell exhaustion, the mechanisms by which T cell responses are attenuated during chronic infections and cancer. He helped identify the role of the “checkpoint” molecule PD-1 and others for reinvigoration of exhausted T cells in cancer. Dr. Wherry’s work has defined the underlying molecular and epigenetic mechanisms of exhausted T cells. His laboratory has also recently focused on applying systems immunology approaches to define Immune Health patients across a spectrum of diseases, including an emphasis on the pharmacodynamic responses of immune cells and immune pathways following therapeutic interventions. In 2020-2021, Dr. Wherry’s laboratory focused considerable efforts on the immunology of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, including establishing a new Immune Health Project to interrogate and use immune features to identify novel treatment opportunities.