Michal Caspi Tal (Mikki), is an immunoengineer, and a principal scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Tal leads the Tal Research Group within the department of Biological Engineering and also serves as the associate scientific director of the Center for Gynepathology Research at MIT. Michal received her PhD at Yale University in Immunobiology under the mentorship of Dr. Akiko Iwasaki researching how immune responses to viruses are impacted by processes such as aging. Dr Tal then did her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Irving Weissman at Stanford where she later became an instructor at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University leading the infectious disease team and studying immumodulatory mechanisms which impact immune clearance of infectious disease, with a focus on Lyme disease. From tick-borne disease to COVID, there are many similarities across the infection-associated chronic illnesses and important sex differences in the immune response to infection which could impact risk for developing chronic illness. Michal is trying to understand why not everyone can just “bounce back” from an infectious disease. She’s combining preclinical and clinical investigation to map distinct illness trajectories and to examine how sex, hormones, and age differences impact these trajectories and disease outcomes. Dr. Tal is running the largest clinical study at MIT, MAESTRO, comparing and contrasting the responses in people suffering from chronic Lyme and Long COVID with comprehensive deeply multi-modal profiling aimed at transforming assessments that are currently subjective into objective informative diagnostics that can point to targeted therapeutics. These involve developing informative metrics for measuring “brain fog”, inflammation, blood flow, barrier integrity, metabolic function, and other key disease determinants. This is complemented with mechanistic research in the mouse model of Lyme disease to deeply investigate sex and age differences of immune responses to Lyme disease and how to identify the core factors of the return to health vs debilitating disease. Our goal is to replace subjective uncertainty with objective data, empowering patients with a deeper understanding of their own biology and providing scientists and clinicians with a blueprint for deconstructing complex illnesses, identifying mechanism-based endotypes, and accelerating the discovery of targeted, next-generation therapeutics.