Dr. Katherine Olson is an instructor in the Movements Disorder Program within the department of pharmacology and experimental neuroscience at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She has devoted herself to studying immunity in Parkinson’s disease (PD) for more than a decade. She has expertise in T cell immunology, regulatory T cell phenotyping, animal disease modeling, clinical trial translation and biomarker development. She currently studies the use of immunomodulation and neuroprotective immunity to control peripheral immune responses that affect disease progression. Recently, she has performed collaborative research efforts to study pharmacological pathways to modify adaptive immune responses for PD, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and neuroHIV. Currently, her work focuses on mechanisms of T cell-mediated neurodegeneration and neuroprotection using vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF).