Dr. Leifer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University. She received her Bachelor of Science from the University of Maryland College Park and her PhD from the Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences at Cornell. While a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda Maryland, she began work on the intracellular localization and trafficking of receptors critical for innate immune responses: Toll-like receptors. Her current research is on the regulation of TLRs and macrophages in driving host defense and autoimmune inflammation. She has obtained R01, R21, R25 and R03 funding from the NIAID, as well as K22 funding from the NCI. She is currently co-director of the Cornell PACE program that can be found at blogs.cornell.edu/pace. She is also co-host of the podcast Immune.