Dr. Karen Cyndari graduated with her MS from Roswell Park Cancer Institute in 2011 where she studied MHC Class I assembly in the lab of Naveen Bangia. From there she was accepted to the MD/PhD program at SUNY Upstate in Syracuse, NY, and joined the labs of Kenneth Mann and Megan Oest.  She successfully defended her PhD dissertation in 2017, focusing on mechanisms of aseptic loosening of human total knee replacements.  This work primarily used a human postmortem knee model to provide in vivo data of total joint replacement fixation and bone resorption. She graduated with her MD in 2019 and matched to the University of Iowa Emergency Medicine (EM) residency class of 2022, graduating as chief resident.  She was also the first EM resident accepted to the Physician Scientist Training Pathway program. Dr. Cyndari became an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, Emergency Medicine Department, in July 2024. Her research focuses on the unique immune regulation of the joint space as maintained by the synovial resident macrophage and other synovial cells.  She hopes to use her experience in immunology, emergency medicine, and the human knee to examine mechanisms of Infectious and Inflammatory arthritis. 

Dr. Karen Cyndari is mentored by Dr. Christine Petersen, DVM, PhD, who has been her research mentor since 2019. In Dr. Petersen’s lab, Dr. Cyndari was introduced to L. infantum and B. burgdorferi research. For residency and fellowship, together they developed a project to understand the immune cell response in the transition from acute Lyme Arthritis to Antibiotic Refractory Lyme Arthritis. This involved recruiting patients from the Emergency Department who were being evaluated for new arthritis and sampling joint fluid for analysis. This work is on-going.