How Dr. Ebony N. Gary Is Carving Her Own Path in Biomedical Research

Ebony Gary grew up in Brooklyn, curious about the world and drawn to biology in a way that felt less like a career choice and more like a calling. She followed that instinct through an undergraduate degree at the University of the Sciences, then deeper into the immune system during her M.S. and Ph.D. in Immunology and Microbiology at Drexel University. By 2019, she had landed at The Wistar Institute as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. David Weiner, one of the country’s leading vaccine scientists and director of Wistar’s Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center.

On January 1, 2026, she added a new title to her name: Research Assistant Professor.

The promotion recognizes what her colleagues have seen building for years — a scientist with an instinct for the right questions, the discipline to design experiments that answer them cleanly, and a productivity record that speaks for itself. In her time at Wistar, Dr. Gary has authored more than 20 manuscripts, a remarkable output that reflects both the quality and the pace of her work.

“Ebony is an unstoppable scientific force,” said Dr. Weiner. “She is highly innovative and excels at reducing complex scientific questions into manageable, well-designed experiments. Her research is centered on developing cutting-edge approaches that address critical health challenges facing at-risk human populations. Through her focused and disciplined approach to science, she leads by example.”

The new title has changed her day-to-day life in ways both expected and surprising. The bench work continues, but the world around it has expanded considerably. She now serves as a primary scientific and administrative lead on several large, multi-investigator grants, acting as the point person for managing budgets, timelines, and relationships with a wide range of external partners — academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and contract research organizations.

“It doesn’t change your bench work, but outside the bench, it changes a lot,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve taken over as administrator on two big grants where I play point person, managing budgets, timelines, and schedules with partners in and out of Wistar. I’m enjoying it, but it’s busy!”

She is also deeply invested in the people coming up behind her, mentoring trainees across multiple career stages and contributing to the intellectual direction of the Weiner laboratory — responsibilities that, taken together, reflect the kind of trust and independence that define scientific leadership.

While she navigates her expanding role, Dr. Gary’s scientific curiosity remains as sharp and focused as ever. Her research sits at a fascinating intersection: immunology and metabolism, and specifically, how to build better vaccines for the people who need them most — the elderly, the obese, and others whose immune systems are already fighting on multiple fronts.

These populations are particularly vulnerable. Aging and obesity both trigger a state of chronic, low-grade inflammation — the kind that quietly undermines the immune system over time, dulling its response to vaccines and increasing susceptibility to infectious disease and cancer. The immune cells of these patients don’t function the way they should. They produce too many of the wrong signals and not enough of the right ones, leaving them exposed precisely when protection matters most.

Dr. Gary wants to change that. And right now, she’s particularly interested in a class of drugs that has captured the attention of the entire medical world: GLP-1 receptor agonists, including the widely discussed drug semaglutide, known commercially as Ozempic and Wegovy.

These medications were originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes and have become well known for their dramatic effects on weight loss. But data emerging from clinical trials points to something broader and more intriguing — they appear to reduce inflammation throughout the body. For Dr. Gary, that raises a cascade of questions that sit right at the heart of her research program.

“There’s a lot of data coming out of clinical trials for GLP-1 drugs that say they reduce inflammation,” she explains. “But what does reducing inflammation mean in the context of pathogenic inflammation associated with aging or obesity? Aged patients and obese patients have lower responses to vaccines and increased risk for cancer development, probably because they have a type of uncontrolled, bad inflammation. But if GLP-1 drugs turn down inflammatory cytokine production, do they make immune responses better in aged populations? Could they improve cancer outcomes? Or treat inflammatory diseases like arthritis?”

These are exactly the kinds of questions sitting at the edge of what medicine currently knows — questions with real consequences for some of the most vulnerable patients in our healthcare system. They are also the questions that Dr. Gary is now building her independent research program around, developing next-generation vaccines and molecular adjuvants designed to work with, rather than against, the biological realities of aging and metabolic disease.

For a scientist who has spent years asking hard questions about how to protect the most vulnerable among us, the promotion to Research Assistant Professor is not an arrival — it is a launching pad. The bench work continues, the mentorship deepens, and the science keeps moving. Dr. Gary has always known exactly what kind of scientist she wanted to be. Now, she has the title, the independence, and the platform to prove it.