Rebecca Porritt, PhD
Research Scientist I, Department of Pediatrics and Biomedical Sciences
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, UCLA School of Medicine
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Dr. Porritt is a faculty research scientist in the Departments of Pediatrics and Biomedical Sciences at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles. Dr. Porritt’s research focuses on understanding the immunopathogenesis of vasculitis diseases including Kawasaki Disease vasculitis and more recently Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), which has emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Porritt received her doctorate at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research, Australia, under the mentorship of Prof. Paul Hertzog and joined the Department of Pediatrics at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in 2016 as a postdoctoral researcher under the mentorship of Prof. Moshe Arditi. Dr. Porritt takes a translational approach to understand Kawasaki Disease vasculitis, drawing hypothesis from human data and applying these to murine models to identify targeted therapeutics to prevent cardiovascular lesion development. Recently, Rebecca’s work has focused on immune-stromal interactions driving KD cardiovascular lesion development and sex differences in disease. Dr. Porritt’s work on MIS-C has identified a unique HLA class I associated TCR signature in the severe form of the disease and is currently working to understand how these T cell responses may mediate disease pathogenesis.