Molly Keppell, BS, MS, joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Oncology as an Instructor in January 2025. She was raised in southern Illinois and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While there, she earned her B.S. and M.S. in Crop Science. Her research there focused on diseases of sweet corn and diagnosing diseased plants at the Plant Clinic. After obtaining her masters, she moved to the California Bay Area and began a career in the biotech industry working for Applied Biosystems. Keppell moved down to San Diego in 2004 and began working for Applied Biotech, where she researched lateral flow tests for drugs of abuse. She was transferred to England where she helped develop a new Clear Blue line of pregnancy tests created to track pregnancy progression. Upon returning the states, she settled in St. Louis and began working for Monsanto where she optimized assays for detecting transgenic proteins in corn and sugarcane. In 2010, she started at Washington University working under Dr. Megan Cooper.
For eleven years, most of her work focused on the metabolic pathways that regulate NK cell functional responses. Her studies included generating mice with impaired pathways critical to glycolysis or oxidative phosphorylation, and determining how disrupting these pathways affected NK cell memory, cytokine production, killing, and proliferation. On the human side, she optimized assays for t-cell polarization for patients that had a STAT3 gain-of-function mutation that caused impaired t cell signaling. In 2022, she began working in the Siteman Flow Core helping the core transition to spectral flow cytometry. Her key interests are flow cytometry, spectral flow, OMIQ, FlowJo and Optimized Multicolor. Currently, she trains new users on the acquisition and analysis software for spectral flow with a special emphasis on aiding new students working on high parameter panels. Molly resides in St. Louis with her husband and two sons.