Stormy grew up in the small town of Exeter in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. She studied chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Chicago, where she worked in the Piccirilli Lab using phage display technology to perform in vitro affinity maturation of antibodies. These antibodies were then used as chaperones to facilitate RNA crystallization for structural studies.

After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles to join the Bjorkman Lab at Caltech. There, she used X-ray crystallography to study how human broadly neutralizing antibodies recognize hepatitis C virus and how some individuals are able to spontaneously clear infection without treatment to inform vaccine design.

Driven by her growing interest in antibodies and the remarkable adaptability of B cells, Stormy went on to pursue a PhD in Immunology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed her thesis research in the Gearhart Lab at the National Institute on Aging, where she investigated how transcriptional regulation, both at the level of RNA Polymerase II and through the histone code, influences somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination. Despite decades of research since the discovery of their initiating enzyme, activation-induced deaminase, the mechanisms that distinguish and regulate these two processes remain incompletely understood. Her work identified a distinct molecular signature at the IgH locus in B cells undergoing class switch recombination that is absent in germinal center B cells undergoing somatic hypermutation, providing insight into the spatiotemporal regulation of these two related but distinct processes.

Outside of the lab, Stormy enjoys hiking, hosting board game nights with friends, and spending cozy evenings cross stitching or playing The Legend of Zelda with her cats snuggled up nearby.

Contact: stormyruiz@mednet.ucla.edu