Krystalyn E. Hudson PhD

Dr. Krystalyn E. Hudson is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Laboratory of Transfusion Biology at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Immunology from Emory University and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Hudson leads an NIH-funded research program aimed at unraveling the complexities of immune responses to red blood cells (RBCs), including both autoimmunity and alloimmunity, with implications for transfusion medicine, pregnancy, and transplantation. Her team has made seminal contributions to the field, including the development of two innovative murine models of autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA), which revealed a critical three-week tolerization window for RBC-autoreactive T cells, identified a novel T cell subset predictive of tolerance failure and AIHA onset, and uncovered new therapeutic targets. In parallel, her laboratory recently discovered that patients with sickle cell disease retain functional mitochondria in mature RBCs—an abnormality that may contribute to alloantibody production. Building on this observation, they demonstrated that mitochondria-containing reticulocytes enhance RBC alloimmunization.