De'Broski R. Herbert

Dr. De’Broski R Herbert’s career has spanned 4 major research institutions across two continents: University of Cape Town, South Africa (2000-2006), University of Cincinnati/Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (2006-2012), University of California at San Francisco (2012-2016) and the University of Pennsylvania (2016-present). The over-arching goal of the Herbert research program is to use parasitic organisms as a guide to investigate basic mechanisms of host immunity, inflammation and wound healing. Most of this work has focused on the immune response to parasitic helminths, organisms that are the likely evolutionary driving force for Type 2 immunity. Helminths are a major cause of disease in impoverished populations (~2-3 billion people) and biomedical research focused on parasitic helminths has been a fertile ground for scientific discovery. Surprisingly, most helminth species can survive for years, even decades in their hosts due to a variety of mechanisms including those that suppress and evade host immunity. Given this complex biology, research projects based in the Herbert lab focus on the mechanisms that initiate Type 2 responses, those that drive tissue repair, and requirements for host protective immunity at the sites where worms invade and reside (e.g., skin, respiratory tract, and intestine).

Dr. Herbert is currently a Penn Presidential Professor in the department of Pathobiology at Penn Vet. He is the executive director for Education and Outreach of IIZD and serves informal advisory roles for 15 students who are either Latinx or Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) enrolled in veterinary, graduate, and medical school programs here at UPenn and across the country. Dr. Herbert has served as the Immunology Graduate Group diversity chair (2017-2020) and the Diversity Initiative Leader for Keystone Symposia. Dr. Herbert’s role in IIZD is to build fellowship and mentoring programs for URM students at multiple levels of training (i.e., high school, graduate and post-graduate level), with the goal of increasing diversity of the biomedical workforce. He is an active participant in multiple the Penn graduate student organizations that support diversity in research including IDEAL and E.E. Just Biomedical society programs, THE STEMPrep program that focuses on high school students and serves as thesis mentor for 4 graduate students. He is also building an international network of graduate student mentees located in low-and-middle income countries (LMIC) paired with U.S.-based scientists, with the intent of increasing the pool of graduate and post-doctoral candidates from South American and African countries.

Due to an inherent fascination with parasitic helminthes (worms), De’Broski R. Herbert earned a B.S. degree in Microbiology from Xavier University of Louisiana (1994) and a Ph.D. in Immunology from Thomas Jefferson Medical College (2000). His dissertation focused on intestinal parasitic worms where he demonstrated a critical role for interleukin 5 and eosinophils in host-protective immunity against Strongyloides stercoralis, a human pathogen that has re-emerged during COVID-19. As part of a life-long dream, De’Broski spent 5 years in South Africa to complete his post-doctoral training at the University of Cape Town in the laboratory of Frank Brombacher Ph.D. This resulted in seminal work that demonstrated IL-4/IL-13 driven alternative macrophage activation controls lethal immunopathology during Schistosoma mansoni infection. This work opened a new field of immunology focused on alternatively activated macrophages, which are one of the key immune cell types responsible for tissue repair. Subsequently, he joined the laboratory of Fred. D. Finkelman M.D. and published multiple studies focused on the importance of IL-4/IL-13 in driving host-protection against parasitic helminthes through direct regulation of tissue macrophage function. As an independent principal investigator of his own laboratory, DeBroski has held faculty positions at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, University of California San Francisco and since 2016 at the University of Pennsylvania school of veterinary medicine. Dr Herbert has published over 60 peer reviewed articles and travels extensively as an invited seminar speaker for national and international institutions. He has long standing collaborations in across the globe and travels to Europe and Africa routinely. Recently, Dr. Herbert has expanded his responsibilities to becoming a new farmer as he decided to re vitalize land that he inherited from his grandfather, the late Walter Daniel Stepps. Dr Herbert intends to make a difference in the local black community of Palmers crossing where he grew up by creating a source of fresh produce for individuals who are now living in a veritable food desert.

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