Patrick Mitchell

Patrick is a proud alumnus of Pitzer College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center under the mentorship of Dr. Harmit Malik and Dr. Michael Emerman studying the evolution of host-virus interactions. Patrick completed his postdoctoral training with Dr. Russell Vance at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied a class of host innate immune sensors called inflammasomes.

Dr. Mitchell is a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Research in the Mitchell lab is focused on understanding basic principles that govern host-pathogen interactions. We are particularly interested in how host cells recognize and respond to infectious threats (e.g., viral and bacterial pathogens) via the detection of pathogen-specific activities, and how such "effector-triggered immunity" contributes to host defense and inflammatory disease.