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Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Department of Microbiology-Immunology

News & Announcements

Read the latest news from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Department of Microbiology-Immunology. The links below take you to articles where you can learn more about our faculty’s latest achievements, awards and honors.

  • 10.05.2026

    Brandon Jutras, PhD, associate professor of Microbiology-Immunology, passed away unexpectedly on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, at age 44. An internationally recognized scientist, Jutras dedicated his career to translational medicine, studying the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, and advancing research to improve diagnostics and treatments for patients. His work touched countless lives and will continue to shape the future of Lyme disease research.

     

    Jutras received his PhD at the University of Kentucky in 2013, and following postdoctoral work at Yale, he joined the faculty at Virginia Tech. In 2024, he was recruited to Northwestern as an associate professor. Jutras was a wonderful colleague who was full of energy and always willing to engage in fruitful conversations about science.

    Jutras published many outstanding papers, including two in Science Translational Medicine in 2025, that demonstrated that the peptidoglycan of Borrelia can persist in discrete tissues and cause systemic Lyme disease, and identified an effective treatment. Jutras' research earned national recognition throughout his career. In addition to multiple NIH grants, he received the Bay Area Lyme Foundation's Emerging Leader Award, supporting his work on Lyme disease diagnostics. His lab's diagnostic test — which uses monoclonal antibodies with immuno-PCR and lateral flow technology to detect a unique Borrelia biomarker in blood and urine — went on to win the LymeX Diagnostics Prize, a national competition supported by the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation.

    Jutras was the beloved husband of Kristin Rose Jutras and devoted father of their two-year-old daughter. He is also survived by members of his close and loving family – his parents, Debbie and Richard Jutras; his sister, Heather Jutras, her husband, Sam Herold and their daughters.

    Read the full obituary.

  • 06.29.2026

    A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has offered insight into how Staphylococcus aureus, a major human pathogen, fine-tunes its internal RNA degradation machinery to survive stress and potentially cause infection.

  • 03.12.2026

    Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered how calcium signaling channels in the brain’s immune cells regulate neuroinflammation and promote the development of behaviors associated with affective mood disorders, according to a recent study published in Science Signaling.

  • 02.04.2026

    Lyme disease, the bacterial infection transmitted by ticks, is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States, with nearly half a million people diagnosed and treated each year, according to the CDC. Two pivotal studies on Lyme disease from the lab of Brandon Jutras, PhD, provide important insights into what may cause persistent Lyme disease symptoms in a subset of patients. This research points to some promising new directions for both diagnosis and therapeutic intervention.  

  • 01.02.2026

    Northwestern Medicine scientists in the laboratory of Stephen Miller, PhD, have identified the cellular and molecular mechanisms required for the antigen-specific tolerance inducing abilities of a novel nanoparticle therapy for treating autoimmune diseases, according to a recent study published in Science Advances.

  • 12.10.2025

    Northwestern Medicine investigators have identified issues with most genomic sequence data for the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacterium, findings that could complicate future epidemiological and pathogenesis studies, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

  • 12.02.2025

    A recent study has provided the first side-by-side comparison of how three major COVID-19 vaccine types differ in triggering immune responses and sustaining protection, according to an analysis published in JCI Insight.  

  • 11.24.2025

    Northwestern Medicine scientists have identified previously unknown genetic mechanisms that promote antimicrobial resistance in gonorrhea, findings that may inform the development of more effective treatment strategies, according to a recent study published in PLoS Pathogens.