About the Cover
Lymphatic vessels are present throughout most organs, including the skin, as shown in the cover image, and have been considered primarily to provide transport functions for tissue fluid balance and cell exit from peripheral tissues. In addition to this classical role, however, emerging evidence implicates the lymphatic endothelium as an important regulator of adaptive immune responses, including dampening host immunity against tumors. The cover image is an immunofluorescence confocal microscopy image of an immunostained whole mount preparation of the dorsal mouse ear dermis, which shows lymphatic capillaries (Lyve-1, green), basement membrane (collagen IV, cyan), MHC class II cells (white), and blood vessels (CD31, red). CD31 is also present in cell–cell junctions of the lymphatic vessels (yellow). Scale bar, 50 microns. Tissue preparation, immunostaining, and confocal immunofluorescence imaging were performed by Witold Kilarski (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.)

About the Master
Melody A. Swartz, PhD, is the William B. Ogden Professor of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and Professor of Bioengineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in the Institute for Bioengineering and the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research. Dr. Swartz was trained in chemical engineering; she earned a BS at The Johns Hopkins University in 1991 and a PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. Her PhD thesis was completed in the laboratory of Dr. Rakesh Jain at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she investigated how the transport functions of lymphatic vessels were coupled to the local tissue biomechanics and developed mathematical and experimental models to understand how the lymphatics respond to edema and how they restore homeostatic fluid balance. Dr. Swartz performed her postdoctoral studies in airway biomechanics at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, where she investigated how mechanical stresses are communicated between cells to instigate stress-dependent remodeling of the extracellular matrix. She was attracted to the discipline of engineering because of its quantitative and systems-level approaches to problem solving that can be used to address fundamental biological questions. After completing her training, Dr. Swartz joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University as an assistant professor in 1999. She moved to the EPFL in 2003, where she was promoted to associate professor in 2006, and then full professor in 2010. After being away for over a decade, Dr. Swartz returned to her hometown, Chicago, in 2014, as she joined the newly founded Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.
With her training as a bioengineer, coupled with strong interests in cancer immunology, Dr. Swartz uses quantitative and multidisciplinary approaches to investigate the roles of the lymphatic system in immunophysiology and pathophysiology, focusing her efforts on the interface between vascular biology, transport biomechanics, and immunology. Her laboratory is currently exploring the function of lymphatic drainage in maintaining local immunologic tolerance and the roles of lymphangiogenesis in pathologic tolerance in diseases including cancer. These investigators are applying the cumulative knowledge of systems immunology of the lymphatic system to develop novel immunotherapeutic approaches in cancer, including lymph node–targeting vaccine approaches.
Dr. Swartz was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2007, and as a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society in 2012. She has received numerous awards, including the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award in 2002, the Biomedical Engineering Society's Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award in 2001, the European Research Council Investigator Awards in 2008 and in 2013, and the 2010 Robert Wenner Prize for Cancer Research from the Swiss Cancer League. In recognition of her creativity in research, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2012.