Kaitlyn Sadtler

Kaitlyn Noelle Sadtler is an American immunologist and bioengineer and Stadtman tenure-track Investigator at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, known for her research on immune-active biomaterials for regenerative medicine and for completing the first population-wide serosurvey during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in 2020.

Education Sadtler attended Urbana High School in Ijamsville, Maryland. She went on to earn her BS in biomedical science summa cum laude at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2011. She credits her undergraduate engineering experience with giving her a wide view of the different fields that are foundational to her current work. Sadtler is among a cohort of researchers including Kizzmekia Corbett from UMBC who rose to prominence in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before starting her PhD, Sadtler held a one-year postbaccalaureate research position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where she says she "caught the immunology bug." Parts of her thesis work were published in journals such as Science and Nature Methods. During her postdoc, Sadtler was recognized as a TED fellow for her talk "How we could teach our bodies to heal faster." She was also named an inaugural (2018) Convergence Scholar for her work in nanomedicine by the Koch Institute and honored as one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2019 for her doctoral research on immune rejection of medical devices.

SARS-CoV-2 serosurvey Sadtler organized the first population-wide serosurvey for COVID-19 in the United States, considered critical in developing an understanding of asymptomatic transmission rates. From April to July 2020, her group and collaborators enrolled 10,000 representative volunteers to mail in dry blood samples for testing by ELISA. Initial testing of those samples was completed by the end of September. The initial analysis, released as a preprint in early 2021, indicated that there may have been as many as 4.8 unreported infections for each documented infection early in the pandemic, or up to 16.8 million undiagnosed infection. Results also supported that black and Hispanic communities have been most affected by the virus. At the time, when the study was available only as a preprint, Sadtler expressed hopes for eventual follow-up to assess antibody duration and reinfection frequency; the work has since undergone peer review and been published in Science Translational Medicine.