2006 Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievements by a Young Investigator
Dr. Abraham is an assistant professor of medicine and laboratory medicine and pathology at the Mayo College of Medicine and co-director of the clinical immunology laboratory (where she is director of the cellular and molecular immunology section) at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, she investigated the immunogenetic mechanisms that contribute to the pathophysiology of systemic lupus erythematosus and Type 1 diabetes in human leukocyte antigen (HLA) transgenic animal models as the principal investigator on two grants. She then joined the faculty, with a research focus on B cell clonal evolution and differentiation in the pathogenesis of immunoglobulin light chain amyloidosis, a bone marrow plasma cell dyscrasia.
She was also actively involved in the clinical immunology laboratory in the dysproteinemia area. Her current clinical laboratory and research interests are in the area of laboratory diagnosis of primary immunodeficiencies and the assessment of immune competence, function, and reconstitution in a variety of clinical settings, including solid organ transplantation, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, immunotherapy, and cancer vaccines.
She is also involved in teaching clinical immunology to graduate students, pathology residents, clinical chemistry fellows, and allied laboratory health staff. Together with many collaborators and trainees, she has authored 25 peer-reviewed papers and 21 abstracts. She is a manuscript reviewer for Clinical Immunology and the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
She received the 2003 George Grannis Young Investigator Award from the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry (NACB).