Understanding immunity.
Improving lives.
We investigate how T cells and B cells make decisions—individually and together—and how those decisions shape tolerance, infection, cancer and autoimmune disease.
Different cells.
Shared questions.
The Akkaya Lab combines two complementary research programs. We ask how immune cells interpret signals and how those decisions determine survival, function, tolerance and disease.
Regulatory T cells where tolerance is decided.
How Tregs adapt to inflammatory environments, interact with antigen-presenting cells and control immune responses in autoimmunity, neuroinflammation and cancer.
T-cell research →How B cells decide what happens next.
How receptor, innate and metabolic signals integrate to govern B-cell survival, differentiation, antigen presentation and immunity.
B-cell research →Publications
Recent work across T-cell biology, B-cell biology, immune signaling and computational immunology.
News & highlights
Recent papers, awards, talks, new team members and milestones from across the lab.
Mechanobiology of regulatory T cells
A new review examines how cellular mechanics and physical context shape regulatory T-cell suppressive function.
TCRoss connects computation with T-cell specificity
The Akkaya and Yilmaz teams reported a property-interactive transformer approach for decoding T-cell receptor specificity beyond dataset biases.
Akkaya Lab at IMMUNOLOGY2025
Science, conversations and community at the annual immunology meeting.
HPV-VLP vaccines and human B-cell activation
New work in PNAS explores how HPV virus-like particle vaccines mimic membrane-associated antigens during human B-cell activation.
The people behind the pipettes.
Running, volunteering, dinners, celebrations and the moments that bring the lab together outside the bench.
A community of happy pipetters
Competitive runners
Both PIs are marathoners, members of Run Columbus, and active racers from the 5K through the marathon.
Miles outside the lab
Billur and Münir are active runners and members of Run Columbus. Both are marathoners and regularly train and race distances from the 5K through the marathon. Running is one of the ways they challenge themselves, recharge and spend time together away from the bench.
Curious people wanted.
We welcome students, trainees and collaborators who like hard questions, careful experiments and crossing boundaries between immunology, computation and disease biology.