Rate My Professor Haydn Kissick

Haydn T. Kissick, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Urology at Emory University School of Medicine with a joint appointment in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. He serves as a member of the Cancer Immunology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute and the Emory Vaccine Center. Kissick received his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Western Australia in 2011 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship studying cancer immunology at Harvard Medical School. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned a BSc (Hons) from the same institution in 2006. His career at Emory focuses on translational research bridging basic immunology and clinical trials.

Kissick's research investigates the fundamental mechanisms of the T-cell response to cancer, with emphasis on stem-like T cell persistence, activation states, and exhaustion in tumor microenvironments. His lab has pioneered concepts such as the intra-tumoral niche for stem-like CD8 T cells and the role of stem-like CD4 T cells in regulating immunity versus tolerance to cancer. These findings, including a recent discovery of a novel immune cell subset, hold promise for enhancing cancer immunotherapy efficacy. The lab employs next-generation sequencing to identify personalized vaccine targets in prostate cancer and collaborates on biomarker studies and clinical trials for genitourinary malignancies at Winship Cancer Institute. Key publications include "Defining CD8+ T cells that provide the proliferative burst after PD-1 therapy" (Nature, 2016), "An intra-tumoral niche maintains and differentiates stem-like CD8 T cells" (Nature, 2019), "CD8 T cell exhaustion in chronic infection and cancer: opportunities for interventions" (Annual Review of Medicine, 2018), and "CD8+ T cell activation in cancer comprises an initial tetradimensional state followed by stem-like persistence" (Immunity, 2023). Kissick has earned the Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award (2014), Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2013), Cancer Research Institute Lloyd J. Old STAR grant (2023), a $1.25 million grant to study immune responses to cancer (2023), and the Albert E. Levy Award for Excellence in Scientific Research (2025).