iUIS 2023 Plenary Speakers
Plenary Sessions bring together three diverse global experts to share their insights on the state of immunology, followed by a moderated discussion. IUIS 2023 is delighted to have plenary sessions covering Plenary topics.
Biography
Judi Allen is a Professor of Immunobiology at the University of Manchester, UK. Judi obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley following several years in the Biotech industry and moved to Imperial College, London for her postdoc. At Imperial she began work on the immune response to helminths, which has remained the focus of her research career. Judi subsequently established her own group at the University of Edinburgh with an MRC Senior Fellowship where she remained for over 20 year. In 2016, Judi joined the Faculty of Biology, Medicine & Health at the University of Manchester. Judi is best known for her work on the biology of macrophages in the context of macroparasite infection and is particularly interested in the relationship of type 2 immunity to wound repair pathways. Judi is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences and a member of EMBO. In 2023 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Biography
Dr. Yasmine Belkaid is a Distinguished Investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health (Bethesda). She obtained her Master in Biochemistry at the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene in Algiers, Algeria and her Ph.D from Pasteur Institute in France. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of health (Bethesda) on immune regulation during infection, she started her research program at the Children’s Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati. In 2005, she joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and was appointed senior scientist in 2008. Her laboratory explores fundamental mechanisms that regulate tissue homeostasis and host immune responses and uncovered key roles for the microbiota and dietary factors in the control of immunity and protection to pathogens. Dr Belkaid is the Chief of the Laboratory of Hist Immunity and Microbiome, the director of the trans NIH Center for Human immunology and is the founder and Director of the NIAID Microbiome program. Dr Belkaid is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and recipient of numerous awards including the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the Emil von Behring Prize, the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Award, the Robert Koch Award and the AAI Excellence in Mentoring Award.
Biography
Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, MD, PhD, is a distinguished Professor of Medicine specializing in Hematology, Medical Oncology, and Urology. She holds pivotal roles as the Director of Immunotherapy, Medical Director of the Vaccine and Cell Therapy Laboratory, and Co-Director of the Cancer Immunology Program at The Tisch Cancer Institute. Additionally, she is a faculty member at the Icahn Genomics Institute and occupies the Ward Coleman Chair in Cancer Research.
Renowned for her pioneering work in human dendritic cell biology, Dr. Bhardwaj’s contributions span isolation, subset discovery, immunobiology, antigen presenting function, and vaccine adjuvant utilization. She has developed groundbreaking Toll-Like Receptor agonist- and dendritic cell-based vaccines for cancer and infection treatments through investigator-initiated studies. A leader in neoantigen vaccine research at The Tisch Cancer Institute, she adeptly translates scientific progress into meaningful patient trials.
Dr. Bhardwaj’s accolades include recognition as one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Researchers, with the Award for Medical Research in 2004. Notably, she received the Fred W. Alt Award in 2015 from the Cancer Research Institute for novel Immunology discoveries. Her standing is further affirmed through honors like the Berson-Yallow Society Lectureship and the Jacobi Medallion Award, both from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Acknowledged for significant contributions to cancer research, she received the 2022 Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research award from the American Association of Indian Scientists in Cancer Research (AAISCR). Her excellence extends to the European Society for Medical Oncology’s (ESMO) Award for Immuno-Oncology in 2022, an honor bestowed upon exceptional contributions in the field.
Notably, Dr. Bhardwaj is set to join the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer’s (SITC) 2023 Class of Fellows of the Academy of Immuno-Oncology, solidifying her as a leader in the field.
Beyond her research, she is a senior editor for esteemed journals like Cancer Immunology Research and Frontiers in Immunology. Her influence resonates in her involvement with National Institutes of Health Study Sections and advisory councils, and she chairs the Cancer Immunology Steering Committee of the American Association for Cancer Research while serving on its Board of Directors.
Her expertise in securing federal and foundation grants is evident, complemented by her authorship of over 250 publications. Dr. Nina Bhardwaj’s impact is indelible, spanning from pioneering research to clinical translation and leadership in the oncology landscape.
Biography
Patricia Bozza is a Senior Investigator and Head of Laboratory of Immunopharmacology at Oswaldo Cruz Institute/FIOCRUZ, Brazil; Patricia Bozza received her MD from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, Brazil. She obtained postdoctoral training under the mentoring of Dr. Peter Weller at Harvard Medical School as Pew Latin American Fellow. Patricia is Senior Scholar of CNPq, Member of the Brazilian Academy of Science and Member of The World Academy of Science (TWAS). Patricia’s group long-term goal is devoted to conducting translational studies that contribute new knowledge on the interplay of metabolic and inflammatory mechanisms in the pathogenesis of emergent and/or severe infectious diseases, including dengue, Zika and COVID.
Biography
Petter Brodin is Garfield Weston Chair and Professor of pediatric immunology at Imperial College London and professor of Pediatric immunology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. The Brodin lab (https://brodinlab.com/) develops and applies novel experimental and computational methods to describe human immune system variation with a particular interest in the immune systems of children, its development early in life, and its role in health and disease during childhood.
After completing a MD/PhD program at the Karolinska Institute, Brodin joined the Mark M Davis’s laboratory at HHMI, Stanford University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow, investigating the contribution of heritable and non-heritable sources of variation in immune systems of twins (Brodin et al, Cell, 2015). Following this, Brodin returned to Sweden to establish a national facility for immunomonitoring at the Swedish infrastructure hub, Science for Life Laboratory. He also established his own research program applying systems-immunology methods to the study of immune system development early in life. The Brodin lab established a birth cohort and showed differences in early life adaptation between preterm and term infants (Olin et al, Cell, 2018), the global repertoire of maternal antiviral antibodies (Pou et al, Nat. Med, 2019) as well as the imprinting effect of select colonizing microbes such as bifidobacterial early in life (Henrick et al, Cell, 2021). The Brodin lab has also applied its technologies for systems-level immune system analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand COVID-19 in children (Brodin, P, Immunity 2022), the immunology of MIS-C (Consiglio et al, Cell, 2020) and severe COVID-19 (Rodriguez et al, Cell Reports Med, 2020) and are active members of the global COVID-Human Genetic Effort (https://www.covidhge.com/) in which we lead the LongCOVID subgroup (Brodin et al, Nat. Med, 2022).
Biography
Professor Brombacher moved to South Africa from Germany in 1998 to join UCT, where he established an extramural South African Medical Research Council Unit in 2000. In 2005, he became a UCT “Fellow for Life” and South African Research Chair and Coordinator at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Cape Town component). He is A-rated by the NRF.
His group’s main research focus is the understanding of host protective immune responses in human diseases. The group investigates important regulatory mechanisms – including pattern recognition receptors and cytokine network and cellular crosstalk during innate immunity – which may lead to subsequent adaptive immunity or failure thereof. Their strategy is centred on a “gain of knowledge by loss of function” approach based on deficient mouse models generated by gene targeting in embryonic stem cells. The group works on experimental mouse models for TB, leishmaniasis, and trypanosomiasis, as well as helminth infections and schistosomiasis, and have additional interests in allergic conditions such as asthma and food-related allergies.
Professor Brombacher studied Biology at the Alberts-Ludwigs University Freiburg, Germany, and completed his PhD in Molecular Immunology at the Max Planck Institute in 1989.
Biography
My research focuses on B cells. In the first part of my career I worked on murine B cell development and
since 2001, most of my studies have been on human B cells phenotype and function in health and disease.
I was trained in Medicine and also Obstetrics and Gynecology from La Sapienza University of Rome (Italy).
During the studies and even more when I was a post-Doctoral fellow in the United States, at the M.D.
Anderson Hospital in Houston (Texas), I realized that science was my real interest. I wanted to understand
how it works: why people die of cancer and infection, what can we do to change the course of diseases.
With this strong drive, I came back to Europe for a second post-doc at the Max-Plank Institute for
Immunobiology in Freiburg (Germany), in the department of Georges Koehler, who had received the Nobel
price for the discovery of monoclonal antibodies. I spent 13 years in Germany, in a fantastic environment
where scientists from all over the world came to give seminars and we were thought to think and
understand “how it works”. When I came back to Rome, to Bambino Gesù Children Hospital, I had a strong
background in basic immunology of murine B cells, but I wanted to know if all what I had learned was also
true in humans and what we can do for patients. The close contact to clinicians and my role as head of the
Diagnostic Immunology Unit gave me the possibility to learn how human B cells change with age,
immunodeficiency, infection, transplantation and vaccination.
Over the last years my work has been focused on the development and function of memory B cells and
their role in infection and vaccination.
In 2017 we had a measles breakthrough in Italy leading to mandatory vaccination for school children. In
order to fight vaccine hesitancy and the diffusion of false beliefs, I spoke to the public to describe the
situation and the new law. I developed cartoons and games to explain to parents and children how vaccines
work. I also started to collaborate with patients’ associations to identify vaccines appropriate for the
diverse clinical conditions and organized a campaign called “You4us” (in Italian TuXnoi) to explain that
vaccination of the healthy can prevent contagion of those who are unable to respond to vaccines because
of primary or secondary immune deficiency.
I am now working to increase the knowledge of doctors and public on COVID-19 vaccines.
The experience with the public has taught me that it is not sufficient to say that vaccination is a good thing
and that you should get the shot because a certain percentage of the infected will day. People (patients,
children, parents) will be more responsive to the message, if you explain with simple words what a vaccine
does generating protective molecules and cells. We really have to share what we know, because, if we
explain, everybody can understand.
Since 2019 I am Chair of the Publication Committee of IUIS.
Biography
Dr. Marco Colonna was born in Parma, Italy, received his medical degree and specialization in internal medicine at Parma University (Parma, Italy) and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA). He became a scientific member of the Basel Institute for Immunology (Basel, Switzerland). Since 2001 he has been a Professor of Pathology & Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO, USA. Since 2019 Dr. Colonna is a member of the National Academy of Science. Dr. Colonna’s research focuses on immunoreceptors. In this field his accomplishments encompass identification and characterization of the Killer cell Ig-like receptors and HLA-C polymorphisms as their inhibitory ligands, as well as the discovery of the LILR and TREM inhibitory and activating receptor families. Through analysis of the cellular distribution of these receptors, he identified plasmacytoid dendritic cells as source of IFN-/ in anti-viral responses and innate lymphoid cells that produce IL-22 in mucosae. His current areas of research include: 1) Innate lymphoid cells in mucosal immunity. 2) Plasmacytoid dendritic cells in host defense and autoimmunity. 3) TREM2 and innate immunoreceptors in Alzheimer’s disease.
Biography
Mark Morris Davis is the director of and Avery Family Professor of Immunology at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection at Stanford University. Davis was educated at Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for research supervised by Leroy E. Hood.
Davis is well known for identifying the first T-cell receptor genes, which are responsible for T lymphocytes ability to “see” foreign entities, solving a major mystery in immunology at that time. He and his research group have made many subsequent discoveries about this type of molecule, subsequently, specifically concerning its biochemical properties and other characteristics, including the demonstration that T cells are able to detect and respond to even a single molecule of their ligand-fragments of antigens bound to Major Histocompatibility Complex cell surface molecules. He also developed a novel way of labeling specific T lymphocytes according to the molecules that they recognize, and this procedure is now an important method in many clinical and basic studies of T cell activity, from new vaccines against cancer to identifying “rogue” T cells in autoimmunity. In recent years his has increasingly focused on understanding the human immune system, from developing broad systems biology approaches to inventing new methods to help unravel the complexities of T cell responses to cancer, autoimmunity and infectious diseases.
Biography
Dr. Dong is Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and Director for the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute, as well as a principal investigator at the Institute for Immunology at Tsinghua University. Dr. Dong served as a Professor of Immunology and the Director of the Center for inflammation and Cancer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center before his move to China, and also was Dean of Tsinghua University School of Medicine in 2016-2020.
Dr. Dong’s research is to understand the molecular mechanisms whereby immune and inflammatory responses are normally regulated, and to apply this knowledge to the understanding and treatment of infection, autoimmunity and allergy disorders as well as cancer. The work from Dr. Dong’s group has led to the discoveries of Th17 and T follicular helper (Tfh) cell subsets in the immune system and elucidation of their biological and pathological functions.
Dr. Dong has over 200 publications and was rated highly cited researcher for seven times. The honors he has received include the 2009 American Association of Immunologists-BD Bioscience Investigator Award and 2019 International Cytokine and Interferon Society Biolegend-William E. Paul Award. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the advancement of Science and the Chinese Academy of Medicine.
Biography
Prof. Ricardo T. Gazzinelli is the Director of Center for Vaccine Technology from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and a Senior Investigator at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil. He received his post-doctoral training at the National Institute of Infectious Disease and Allergy and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His research focuses in understanding the role of innate immune receptors and immunometabolism in the pathophysiology of malaria. He also coordinates a program for the development of vaccines for neglected tropical diseases and respiratory viral infections.
Biography
Vera Gorbunova is an endowed Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center. Her research is focused on understanding the mechanisms of longevity and genome stability and on the studies of exceptionally long-lived mammals. Dr. Gorbunova earned her B.Sc. degrees at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Dr. Gorbunova pioneered comparative biology approach to study aging and identified rules that control evolution of tumor suppressor mechanisms depending on the species lifespan and body mass. Dr. Gorbunova investigates the role of Sirtuin proteins in maintaining genome and epigenome stability. She also investigates the role of genomic instability and transposable elements in aging and disease. She demonstrated that LINE1 elements trigger innate immune response that drives age-related sterile inflammation. She has more than 100 publications including publications in high profile journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. Her work received awards of from the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Glenn Foundation, American Federation for Aging Research, and from the National Institutes of Health. Her work was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize from PNAS, prize for research on aging from ADPS/Alianz, France, Prince Hitachi Prize in Comparative Oncology, Japan, and Davey prize from Wilmot Cancer Center.
Biography
Name: Brian S. Kim Degree(s): MD, MTR
Title(s): Sol and Clara Kest Professor of Dermatology, Vice Chair of Research, Site Chair Mount Sinai West and Morningside, Director of the Mark Lebwohl Center for Neuroinflammation and Sensation
Current Affiliation(s): Kimberly and Eric J. Waldman Department of Dermatology, Precision Immunology Institute, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Social Media: @itchdoctor; https://www.briankimlab.org
Summary of Research: Understanding how the sensory nervous system interacts with the immune system to shape behavior and tissue inflammation.
Dr. Kim received his M.D. from the University of Washington, was a HHMI-NIH Scholar, completed residency in dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a Master of Translational Research (MTR). The Kim Lab focuses on mechanisms that underlie skin inflammation and the sensation of itch as a fundamental, broad, model paradigm of neuroimmunology. He has >120 peer-reviewed publications, multiple NIH grants, designed pivotal clinical trials that led to novel FDA-approved treatments, and is an inventor of itch-centered technologies. He holds a patent for the use of JAK inhibitors for chronic itch. He is on the editorial board for Cell Reports Medicine, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, section editor for Journal of Immunology and on the board of reviewing editors for eLife.
Biography
Guido Kroemer is currently Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris-Cité,
Director of the research team “Metabolism, Cancer and Immunity” of the French Medical Research Council (INSERM),
Director of the Metabolomics and Cell Biology platforms of the Gustave Roussy Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Hospital Practitioner
at the Hôpital Européen George Pompidou, Paris, France.
Dr. Kroemer’s work focuses on the pathophysiological implications of cell stress and death in the context of aging, cancer and inflammation.
He discovered the ignition of regulated cell death pathways by mitochondrial membrane permeabilization,
the cytoprotective and antiaging effects of macroautophagy, as well as the decisive role of immunogenic cell death in anticancer treatments.
He is member of the Academia Europaea, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering, European Academy of Cancer Sciences (EACS),
European Academy of Sciences (EAS), European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA), European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO),
German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
Biography
Bart N. Lambrecht obtained an MD (1993) and PhD (1999) in Medicine at Ugent and specialized in Pulmonary Medicine (2002) at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is Professor of Pulmonary Medicine at ErasmusMC and at UGent, Belgium, and since 2012 the director of the VIB Inflammation Research Center, hosting 400 scientists . He is a multiple ERC grant awardee and serves on the editorial board of Trends in Immunology and Journal of Experimental Medicine. He has (co)authored over 400 papers in the field of asthma and allergy and respiratory viral infection.
Together with Prof. Hamida Hammad he leads a research unit of 36 people. The research in their unit is centered around the role of antigen-presenting in asthma and respiratory viral infection. They study how DCs and macrophages get activated to bridge innate and adaptive immunity in the lung and cause inflammation in response to allergen inhalation or exacerbations by respiratory virus. They focus on the traditional immunological functions of APCs, but the research team is also known for their approach on how epithelial cells and innate immune cells communicate with APCs to cause or perpetuate disease. Their research strategy is to continuously develop new tools and therapeutic targets, so that they can tackle questions in an innovative and competitive manner. Their ultimate goal is to find novel ways to prevent and treat asthma, and to achieve this goal they set up early stage collaborations with Biotech and Pharma, to take their ideas to the clinic. Since the COVID-19 crisis, he has initiated two large multi-center trials on new immunomodulators in COVID-19, the SARPAC trial testing the effect of inhaled GM-CSF; and the COV-AID trial addressing the impact of early interleukin-1 and -6 blockade in COVID-19.
A full list of publications can be found at https://biblio.ugent.be/person/801000968239
Biography
Professor Sharon Lewin is an infectious diseases physician and basic scientist, who is internationally renowned for her research into all aspects of HIV disease and specifically in pathways to an HIV cure. She is the inaugural Director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Melbourne Laureate Professor of Medicine at The University of Melbourne, and a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Practitioner Fellow. In July 2022, she was elected President of the International AIDS Society (IAS), a global organisation with over 15,000 members. She continues to co-chairs the IAS Global Advisory board for the Towards an HIV Cure initiative. She has played a prominent advisory role to the Australian response to COVID-19 and co-chairs the National COVID Health and Research Advisory Committee (NCHRAC), advising the Chief Medical Officer of Australia. She was recently appointed head of the Cumming Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics, a new research centre established at the Doherty Institute from a philanthropic gift- from Mr Geoff Cumming of $250 million.
Sharon has authored over 360 publications and given over 150 major international invited talks on HIV cure. She has been a Clarivate hi-citation researcher since 2019. She was named Melburnian of the Year in 2014, and in 2015 and was awarded the Peter Wills Medal by Research Australia. In 2019, Sharon was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in recognition of her distinguished service to medical research, and to education and clinical care, in the field of infectious diseases, particularly HIV and AIDS.
Biography
Tak W. Mak is internationally known for his work on the genetics and molecular biology of cancer and the immune system. He has been a major figure in the fields of immunology and molecular and cellular biology for almost 40 years, and is a world leader in basic and translational research into the genetics of immunity and cancer. In 1984, he led the group that cloned the gene encoding a chain of the human T cell receptor. This discovery laid the ground work for our understanding of much of T cell biology and heralded the CAR-T technologies now approved for the treatment of leukemias and lymphomas. Dr. Mak’s lab was also a pioneer in the genetic modification of mouse strains (“knockout mice”) to identify factors associated with susceptibility to immune disorders or various cancers. The Mak team used these mutant animals to elucidate the functions of numerous molecules involved in immune responses, programmed cell death, and tumorigenesis, including the important tumour suppressors p53 and PTEN, and the breast cancer-related genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Notably, in 1995, his group used mutant mice to show that CTLA4 is a negative regulator of T cell activation, paving the way for the development of T cell checkpoint inhibitor regulators as immunotherapeutic agents. Dr. Mak’s laboratory continues to develop novel approaches for designing and producing TCRs that are specific for antigens appearing on the surfaces of cancer cells. In a different vein of investigation, his team recently showed that the brain communicates with the immune system via T and B cells producing acetylcholine, a finding with implications for future treatments of cancer and autoimmune or neurodegenerative diseases. The Mak group continues to uncover immune cell subsets that can synthesize this prototypical neurotransmitter, and is delving into the novel functions of this molecule outside neurotransmission.
In addition to this academic success, Dr. Mak has made significant contributions on the biotech front, in particular co-founding Agios Pharmaceuticals and Treadwell Therapeutics. These companies specialize in delineating metabolic vulnerabilities in tumour cells that can be exploited as novel cancer therapies. Several first-in-class small-molecule compounds are now in clinical trials for the treatment of cancer and certain genetic disorders. This strategy has produced two IDH inhibitors that are now FDA-approved for the treatment of acute myeloblastic leukemias, as well as another first-in-class agent for the treatment of anemia. Two novel agents targeting the aneuploid cancer cells common in advanced solid tumours are now in phase II clinical trials.
Dr. Mak is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, Royal Society of London, National Academy of Sciences (USA), American Society of Arts and Sciences (USA), and American Association for Cancer Research (USA). His copious accomplishments have been recognized by the scientific community through many prestigious awards and honours, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award (Canada), Emil von Behring Prize (Germany), McLaughlin Medal (Canada), King Faisal International Prize for Medicine (Saudi Arabia), Sloan Prize of the GM Cancer Foundation (USA), Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (Germany), Novartis Immunology Prize (Switzerland), Gold Leaf Prize for Discovery (Canada), Albert Szent-Györgyi Prize for Cancer Research (USA) and the 2023 Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research. Dr. Mak holds a dozen honorary degrees from numerous universities in North America and abroad, and serves on the boards of many top-ranked scientific journals and biotechnology companies.
Biography
Dr. Kazuyo Moro is a Distinguished Professor at Graduate School of Medicine Osaka University and Team Leader at RIKEN IMS, Japan. She graduated from Nihon University School of Dentistry in 2003, and obtained her Ph.D from Keio University School of Medicine in 2007. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Keio University, she moved to RIKEN IMS in 2012 as a senior researcher, and in 2015, she became team leader for the Laboratory for Innate Immune Systems. She was appointed as professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at the Graduate School of Medicine Osaka University in 2019. She has been studying group 2 innate lymphocytes (ILC2) which she discovered in 2010. Her research is broad with ILC2 differentiation, regulatory mechanisms, and its role in allergies, fibrosis, infectious diseases, and inflammatory diseases.
Biography
Thumbi Ndung’u is the Director for Basic and Translational Science at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in Durban, South Africa; Programme Director for the Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence (SANTHE); Professor of Infectious Diseases at University College London; Scientific Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s HIV Pathogenesis Programme; and Associate Member of the Ragon Institute. He has a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Nairobi, completed a PhD in Biological Sciences in Public Health from Harvard University, and performed post-doctoral research in Virology at Harvard Medical School. He is a recipient of the South African Medical Research Council Gold award for scientific contributions that have impacted on the health of people and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and an African Academy of Sciences Fellow. His research focuses on understanding how the immune system may be harnessed for HIV prophylactic or therapeutic strategies.
Biography
Dr. Notarangelo is the Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Immunology and Microbiology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH. Before then, he was Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Brescia Italy) and from 2006-2016 Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the characterization of the molecular and cellular bases of inborn errors of immunity, and T-cell immunodeficiencies and thymic defects in particular. He has published more than 500 articles. In the past, he has served as co-Chair of the IUIS Committee on Inborn Errors of Immunity, and as President of the European Society for Immune Deficiencies and the Clinical Immunology Society. In 2019, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Biography
Luke O’Neill is Professor of Biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is a world expert on innate immunity and inflammation. His main research interests include Toll-like receptors, Inflammasomes and Immunometabolism. He is listed by Thompson Reuters/ Clarivates in the top 1% of immunologists in the world, based on citations per paper. Professor O’Neill is co-founder of Sitryx, which aims to develop new medicines for inflammatory diseases. Another company he co-founded, Inflazome was recently acquired by Roche.
He was awarded the The Society for Leukocyte Biology (SLB) Dolph O. Adams award, the European Federation of Immunology Societies Medal, the Milstein Award of the International Cytokine and Interferon Society and the Landsteiner Award from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation) and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Biography
Our mission at IAVI is to translate scientific discoveries into affordable, globally accessible public
health solutions. My team at the Human Immunology Laboratory includes scientists, managers and
operational staff, PhD and Masters Students. Our portfolio of projects includes HIV, TB, Emerging
Infectious Diseases – Marburg, Lassa, Ebola – and Malaria. We specialize in the analysis of
immune responses as part of vaccine development partnerships. Our work spans discovery
research and development, preclinical and clinical vaccine development, through to GCLP
accredited human clinical trials. We are a central repository for clinical samples collected from
clinical research centers worldwide, in support of IAVIs clinical and epidemiology studies.
My expertise is in malaria where I believe we can “Make Malaria History” through vaccination. I
previously led two core teams of over 25 scientists across KEMRI–Wellcome, Kenya and
Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany. Our projects focused on creating highly effective malaria
vaccines through vaccine candidate discovery, identifying immune correlates of protection and
unravelling important mechanisms underlying antibody-dependent protection. We designed an
innovative custom protein microarray KILchip©, a first of its kind in Africa. We built a SMART
network of partners that enabled us to assemble 10,000 samples from across Africa to probe our
chip, the largest study of this nature.
I am President of the International Union of Immunological Societies (> 60,000 members globally)
– the first African and only second woman in this role. I have won multiple prestigious prizes
including the Royal Society Pfizer, the Sofja Kovalevskaja and the UKRI-MRC/DFID African
Research Leader Awards. I am a 2018 TED Fellow and a Fellow of the African Academy of
Sciences. I serve on Boards and Expert Committees at the WHO, Wellcome, UKRI, MVI-PATH &
BactiVac, and have a global footprint as a keynote & motivational speaker. I am an Official
#TOGETHERBAND Ambassador for the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health &
Well-being. I am passionate about emerging African scientists as key agents of change, delivering
the health interventions our continent urgently needs.
Biography
Jo-Ann Passmore is a Medical Scientist with the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) and an Associate Professor in the Division of Medical Virology in the Institute for Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine (IDM) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Jo-Ann Passmore heads the Mucosal Infections Group (MIG) at UCT and the HIV Mucosal Immunology laboratory at the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA).
Since 2002, Jo-Ann Passmore’s research has focused on studying genital tract adaptive and innate immune responses associated with protection from, or susceptibility to, sexually transmitted diseases including HPV and HIV. She is specifically interested in studying biomarkers for susceptibility and protection to HIV infection, including secreted inflammatory molecules, genital immune activation and HIV-specific immune responses present in the female genital tract.
Jo-Ann has been principal investigator on several large grants from the European Developing Clinical Trials Platform (EDCTP), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust, the South African HIV/AIDS Research Platform (SHARP), the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI), the HIV Pathogenesis Programme (Doris Duke Charitable Foundation), the Medical Research Council (South Africa) and the Poliomyelitis Research Foundation. These have supported investigations on the impact of the female reproductive tract mucosa on risk for HIV and HPV infections, and pathogenesis following infection.
Biography
Bali Pulendran is the Violetta L. Horton Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a member of the Institute for Immunology, Transplantation and Infection, and the Departments of Pathology and Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University. He is also an adjunct professor at Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Center, and director of the NIH Center for Systems Vaccinology, at Emory University in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D., from the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, under the supervision of Sir Gustav Nossal. He then did his post-doctoral work at Immunex
Corporation in Seattle. Dr. Pulendran’s research is focused on understanding the mechanisms by which the innate immune system regulates adaptive immunity and harnessing such mechanisms in the design of novel vaccines. More recently, his laboratory pioneered the use of systems biological approaches to predicting the efficacy of vaccines and deciphering new molecular correlates of protection against infectious diseases. Dr. Pulendran’s research is published in front line journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Medicine, and Nature Immunology. Furthermore, Dr. Pulendran is the recipient of numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health, and from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, serves on many editorial
boards, and is the recipient of two concurrent MERIT awards from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Pulendran serves on many advisory boards including that of Keystone Symposia and on the External Immunology Network of GSK. He is listed on Thomson Reuter’s list of Highly Cited Researchers, which recognizes the world's most influential researchers of the past decade, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations.
Biography
Professor Dame Fiona Powrie is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Academy of Medical Sciences, International Member of the National Academy of Sciences and Deputy Chair of the Wellcome Board of Governors. She has received numerous prestigious accolades, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2012). Fiona’s early research identified the functional role of regulatory T cells in intestinal homeostasis and shed light on their development and mechanism of action. She demonstrated that adaptive and innate immune mechanisms contribute to intestinal inflammation and identified the IL-23 pathway as a central player. Her current research examines the mutualistic relationship between the intestinal microbiome and the host immune system and how this breaks down in inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis and cancer. It seeks to translate findings from model systems into the clinic in inflammatory bowel disease patients.
Biography
Hai Qi, Ph.D.
Professor and Dean
School of Medicine, Tsinghua University
Dr. Qi is a Professor in Immunology at Tsinghua University. He studies humoral immune regulation and germinal center biology. His group has made important contributions to understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying T-B interactions, follicular helper T-cell development and function, and germinal center positive selection. His group has also made important contributions to mechanistic understanding of how sexual dimorphism is orchestrated in B-cell immunity and how brain can directly control antibody responses. Dr. Qi is an HHMI International Scholar and has been recognized by numerous awards, including an AAI-BD Investigator Award.
Biography
Professor Helen Rees GCOB, OBE, D.Sc Medicine (honoris causa), LLD (honoris causa), MRCGP, MA and MB BChir (CANTAB), DCH, DRCOG
Helen Rees is internationally recognised as an award-winning global health practitioner who has dedicated her professional career to improving public health in Africa, with a focus on vaccine preventable diseases, HIV and sexual and reproductive health. Helen is the Founder and Executive Director of Wits RHI, the largest research Institute at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Helen is widely respected for her ability to synthesize recommendations from multifaceted inputs and to link research to policy and has successfully chaired many national, regional and global committees in deliberations that have changed key strategies and policies in the African region, and has served on expert structures and committees for WHO, UNAIDS, UNICEF, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation and BMGF. Helen is the Chair of the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority and the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) African Regional Immunization Technical Advisory Group. In the field of vaccines and epidemics, Helen is the Chair of the Gavi Vaccine Investment Strategy which is developing a priority list for procurement of vaccines between 2025-2030 for the world’s poorest 71 countries. She has recently been appointed as the Chair of the MedAccess Board, a global organisation that identifies and funds access to neglected therapeutics and diagnostics required in low- and middle-income countries. Helen has worked extensively on various national and global committees in response to COVID-19. She is a member of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on COVID-19 vaccines and the Co-Chair of the Independent Product Group that advises the global COVAX facility on COVID-19 vaccine procurement for Low- and Middle-income countries.
Biography
David G. Russell, Ph.D., is the William Kaplan Professor of Infection Biology in Microbiology and Immunology, Cornell University. He graduated from St. Andrews University, Scotland, and Imperial College, UK, and has held positions at the Max-Planck-Institüt, NYU Medical School, Washington University School of Medicine and Cornell University. He studies host/pathogen interplay, most notably between the macrophage and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. He has active collaborations with the MLW Clinical Research Program, Blantyre, Malawi, and holds Honorary Professorships at the Kamuzu University for Health Sciences, Blantyre and at Malawi University for Science and Technology, Limbe. His work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, USA, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Mueller Health Foundation.
Biography
Federica Sallusto is Professor of Medical Immunology at the ETH Zurich and USI Lugano and group leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona, Switzerland. She is an expert in the field of human cellular immunology. Her research has focused on dendritic cell and T cell traffic, mechanisms of T cell differentiation and immunological memory. Among her contributions are the definition of “central memory” and “effector memory” T cells as memory subsets with distinct migratory capacity and effector function, the discovery of Th22 cells as a distinct subset of skin-homing T cells, the characterization of non-classic Th1 cells induced by bacteria and of two distinct types of Th17 cells with pro-inflammatory and regulatory properties. She also developed methods for the analysis of human naïve and memory T cell repertoires based on high throughput cellular screenings of expanded T cell libraries that has been instrumental to identify autoreactive T cells in patients with narcolepsy. She is member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina, of EMBO and of the Henry Kunkel Society, international member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Swiss Society for Allergology and Immunology. She is currently president of EFIS, the European Federation of Immunological Societies.
Biography
Dr. Anne Schaefer is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Aging in Cologne, Germany, and a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Friedman Brain Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Schaefer’s research addresses the mechanism of neuronal longevity, focusing on the role of microglia in neuromodulation and neurodegeneration. Dr. Schaefer has been awarded the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Inaugural Landis Mentoring Award for Outstanding Mentorship by the NIH, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, and was named a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences and the Inventor of the Year 2018 by Mount Sinai.
Biography
Professor Scriba is an immunologist and heads a team of clinical immunologists, post-doctoral fellows and postgraduate students at the University of Cape Town, where he is a Member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine; he is also Deputy Director (Immunology) at the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI). SATVI’s mission is the development of new and effective prevention strategies against TB, including vaccination and biomarker-targeted treatment approaches. His particular interests focus on immunopathology of mycobacterial infection and TB disease, correlates of risk of M. tuberculosis infection and TB disease, immunological development in childhood, and novel TB vaccine development. He has been co-investigator on more than 15 phase I/II/IIb clinical trials of novel TB vaccines, and has led the design and immunological analyses of vaccine-induced T cell responses for most of these. In the last 5 years he has also been leading studies of correlates of risk of TB in different cohorts.
Biography
Dr. Sharma is an immunologist and oncologist whose research work is focused on investigating mechanisms and pathways within the immune system that facilitate tumor rejection or elicit resistance to immune checkpoint therapy (ICT). She is a Professor in the departments of Genitourinary Medical Oncology and Immunology. She is also the inaugural Scientific Director for the Immunotherapy Platform and the Director of Sceintific Programs for the James P. Allison Institue at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She’s written and conducted multiple innovative immunotherapy clinical trials, with emphasis on obtaining patients’ tumor samples for in-depth laboratory studies. She designed the first neoadjuvant trial with ICT, which was also the first clinical trial with ICT for patients with bladder cancer. Her studies have identified novel resistance mechanisms to ICT, including loss of interferon (IFN) signaling, VISTA+ immunosuppressive cells, increased EZH2 expression in T cells, TGFb signaling in bone metastases, and CD73+ myeloid cells in GBM. These data have led to initiation of new research studies focused on developing rational combination immunotherapy strategies for the treatment of cancer patients. As a result of her outstanding contributions to the field of cancer immunotherapy, Dr. Sharma was selected as a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) as well as awarded the Emil Frei III Award for Excellence in Translational Research in 2016, the Coley Award for Distinguished Research for Tumor Immunology in 2018, the Women in Science with Excellence (WISE) award in 2020, the Heath Memorial Award in 2021 and the Randall Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research in 2021.
Biography
Arlene Sharpe, MD, PhD is the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. She is a member of the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. She is also the Co-Leader of MassCPR (Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness) established in March 2020 by Harvard Medical School to respond to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and prepare for emerging pathogens of the future.
Dr. Sharpe earned her MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Sharpe is a leader in the field of T cell costimulation. Her laboratory has discovered and elucidated the functions of T cell costimulatory pathways, including the immunoinhibitory functions of the CTLA-4 and PD-1 pathways, which have become exceptionally promising targets for cancer immunotherapy. Her laboratory currently focuses on the roles of T cell costimulatory pathways in regulating T cell tolerance, effective antimicrobial and antitumor immunity, and translating fundamental understanding of T cell costimulation into new therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Dr. Sharpe has published over 400 papers and was listed by Thomas Reuters as one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (top 1%) in 2014-2022 and a 2016 Citation Laureate. She received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor immunology in 2014, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2017 and the SITC Smalley Award in 2020 for her contributions to the discovery of PD-1 pathway. In 2022, she received the FASEB Excellence in Science Lifetime Achievement Award, the AAI Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Rous-Whipple Award from the American Society for Investigative Pathology. Dr. Sharpe is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research, National Academy of Inventors, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer and the American Association of Immunologists.
Biography
Sarah Teichmann is a systems and genome biologist who heads the Cellular Genetics programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge. Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London, and returned to the LMB to start her own group in 2001. In 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus, jointly with the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Sanger Institute, and Sarah has been Head of Cellular Genetics at the Sanger Institute since 2016.
Sarah’s research group develops and applies cell atlasing technologies to map human tissue architecture in order to understand health and disease. In 2016, Sarah co-founded the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) consortium, which she continues to co-lead. The HCA aims to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells and now includes thousands of members from across the world. Sarah is also Director of Research at the Physics Department at the University of Cambridge. Amongst her honours, Sarah is an elected EMBO Member, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Fellow of the Royal Society.
Biography
Henrique Veiga-Fernandes graduated in Veterinary Medicine at Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. He was awarded a PhD in molecular and cellular biology from Université René Descartes, Paris, France. He developed his post-doctoral research at Institut Necker in Paris, France and at the National Institute for Medical Research, London, UK. He started his own group in 2009 at IMM, Portugal. He was member of the IMM board of directors from 2014 to 2016. He joined the Champalimaud Centre for Unknown as senior group leader, in 2016. Currently, he is the director of Champalimaud Research. He made important contributions to the understanding of immunological memory, innate lymphoid cells and neuro-immune interactions. Among other distinctions he received several European Research Council awards, he has been elected as EMBO member in 2015 and Allen Distinguished Investigator in 2018. He is member of the board of reviewing editors of Science AAAS, US.
Biography
Carola Vinuesa obtained a medical degree at the University Autonoma of Madrid. She undertook specialist clinical training in the UK and in 2000 was awarded a PhD by the University of Birmingham. A year later she was the recipient of a Wellcome Trust International Travelling prize Fellowship to do postdoctoral work at The John Curtin School for Medical Research in The Australian National University. Since 2006 she has been a group leader. She has been the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the year (2008), the Gottschalk Medal of the Australian Academy of Sciences (2009). In 2015, she was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. She is currently Professor of Immunology at the Australian National University and Director of the Centre for Personalised Immunology (CPI), an NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence.
Biography
Éric Vivier, DVM, PhD, is Professor of Immunology at the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (Aix-Marseille University, INSERM, CNRS) and at the Public Hospital of Marseille (AP-HM).
He is a co-founder and scientific director
of Innate Pharma, a biotechnology
company dedicated to improving cancer treatment with innovative therapeutic
antibodies that exploit the immune system.
His work focuses on innate immunity and in
particular on Natural Killer cells and other innate lymphoid cells.
He is also President of Paris Saclay Cancer Cluster
Association
Biography
Dr. Bruce D. Walker, a 1980 graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, is a physician-scientist and T cell immunologist, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of the Practice of Medicine at MIT. He is also the founding and current Director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, whose mission is to harness the immune system to prevent and cure disease. Dr. Walker’s laboratory studies T cell responses to chronic viral infections and are notable for the initial identification of HIV-specific T cell responses in infected persons, and subsequent characterization of mechanisms of T cell function, dysfunction and immune escape. He is active in Cambridge MA and in Durban, South Africa, where, as Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he helped catalyze the creation of two research institutes dedicated to the study of HIV and TB. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Walker helped to establish and co-lead the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR), a collaborative effort among over 800 scientists and clinicians united to address current and future pandemics. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He is also the recipient of two MERIT Awards from the NIH and a Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award.
Biography
Irving L. Weissman is a Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Research, Professor of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine and, by courtesy, a professor of biology at the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is also director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Weissman was president of The American Association of Immunologists from 1994 to 1995 and served on the AAI Council from 1989 to 1996. He was elected a Distinguished Fellow of AAI in 2019.
