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The original was posted on /r/askscience by /u/AskScienceModerator on 2023-08-04 11:00:40+00:00.

We are scientists from Emory U. (/u/mcwoodruff) and Wellesley College (/u/kescobo) investigating the immunology and physiology of Long-COVID (also called “post-acute sequelae of COVID-19,” or “PASC”). We recently published a paper where we show that there isn’t just one disease, there are (at least!) two - one subset of which is characterized by inflammation, especially neutrophil activity, and patients with this version of the disease are more likely to develop autoreactivity (we creatively call this subset “inflammatory PASC”). The other subset (non-inflammatory PASC) is a bit more mysterious as the blood signature is a little less obvious. However, even in this group, we find evidence of ongoing antiviral responses and immune-related mediators of lung fibrosis which may give some hints at common pathways of pathology.

Matt is an Assistant Professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has a PhD in Immunology and is currently spending his time building a fledgling lab within the Lowance Center for Human Immunology (read: we’re hiring!). He has a background in vaccine targeting and response, lymph node biology, and most recently, immune responses to viral diseases such as COVID-19.

Kevin is a senior research scientist (read: fancy postdoc) at Wellesley College. He has a PhD in immunology, but transitioned to microbial genomics after graduate school, and now spends most of his time writing code (ask me about julia). His first postdoc was looking at the microbes that grow on the outer surface of cheese (it’s a cool model system for studying microbial communities - here’s the paper) and now does research on the human gut microbiome and its relationship to child brain development.

We’ll be on this afternoon (ET), ask us anything!