Cornelia Weyand

Cornelia Weyand, MD, PhD, is a physician-investigator who has dedicated her research work to autoimmune disease. She is a Professor of Medicine and Immunology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and the Mayo Alix School of Medicine, Rochester, Minn. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of Immunology and Cardiology and remains a faculty member at Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, as professor emerita.

Her contributions to science have followed the arc of how the immune system deviates from host protection to tissue damage and how a loss of immune fitness leads to autoimmune disease. Her research team has identified and characterized molecules of disease in three disease models: rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, and large vessel vasculitis. The team has defined metabolic signatures that trigger and sustain autoimmune tissue inflammation and has implicated malfunction of mitochondria, lysosomes, and the endoplasmic reticulum in pathogenic effector functions. Her work has linked nuclear, telomeric and mitochondrial DNA repair defects to tolerance breakdown. She has now turned her attention to the question of how the immune aging process predisposes to autoimmunity and how defective immune checkpoints and stem-like T cells prevent the resolution of autoimmune disease.