BIO
Dr. Bui has expertise in innate immunity, cancer, hematopoietic stem cells, and cytokines. His formal education in immunology began in graduate school in Dr. Steve Hedrick’s laboratory where he studied T cell development, T cell signaling, and T cell memory, culminating in a publication in Cell. As a post-doctoral fellow, he established a niche in cancer immunology by studying the role of natural killer (NK) cells in Dr. Robert Schreiber’s laboratory, with mentorship from Dr. Wayne Yokoyama, resulting in publications in Cancer Research, Journal of Immunology, and Current Opinion in Immunology. He began a tenure track faculty position at UC San Diego in 2006 and set up a lab studying the role of the innate immune system in cancer surveillance, establishing expertise in innate immunology, NK cells, immune receptors, and cytokine biology with senior or co-senior author publications in Science Immunology, Immunity, Cell, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Cell Reports, Cancer Research, and PNAS. In these publications, he used a broad range of systems, including transplantable and primary tumor models, viral infection models, and bacterial infection models. He studies a broad range of immune cells, including T cells, NK cells, macrophages, and neutrophils, both in vivo and ex vivo.
His clinical experience provides important and unique expertise to his research projects. As a board-certified and licensed clinical pathologist, he serves as the Director of the UCSD Stem Cell Processing Laboratory (SCPL). This state-of-the-art facility adheres to cGMP and cGTP guidelines in the processing and manufacturing of cells to support the UCSD Bone Marrow Transplant team. The SCPL also supports clinical trials involving cellular therapies at UCSD and other sites, including the use of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) and chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells. His other clinical roles are as Director of the Clinical Flow Cytometry Lab and the Diagnostic Immunology Lab. In these roles, he has brought on several Laboratory Developed Tests (LDTs) towards compliance with the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) for patient care. His clinical duties involve extensive collaboration with transplant physicians, hematopathologists, oncologists, rheumatologists, and infectious disease physicians.
His mentoring experience encompasses 20 years of directing a basic research lab in which more than 100 trainees have worked. He has directly mentored high school students, undergraduates, MS students, PhD students, medical students, residents, clinical fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and assistant professors. His laboratory continues to provide fertile training opportunities for a wide range of trainees, and he has restricted his involvement to training not more than six students at a time, as he prefers to have direct hands-on interactions with trainees.
