Congress President: Clive Gray
Clive Gray is Emeritus Professor of Immunology and previous Chair, Division of Immunology, University of Cape Town. He is now based at Stellenbosch University and is Professor of Immunology in Molecular Biology and Human Genetics in the Biomedical Research Institute and heads the Reproductive Immunology Research Consortium in Africa. He is also adjunct Professor in the Department of Immunology, Duke University. He is vice-chair of the IUIS Education Committee and Secretary General of the Federation of African Immunology Societies. He has worked in HIV immunology for over twenty years and is passionate about building immunology capacity in Africa. He is director of the Immunopaedia Foundation and runs the award winning on-line immunology education and teaching immunopaedia platform. He has trained in excess of 500 students around Africa over the past 10 years.
Congress Vice President: Henry Mwandumba
Henry Mwandumba is Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Malawi College of Medicine and Deputy Director of the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW) in Blantyre, Malawi. His research focuses on understanding the effects of HIV-1 infection on lung immunity and predisposition to respiratory infections, particularly tuberculosis. He is President of the Federation of African Immunological Societies (FAIS) and was awarded the 2019 Royal Society Africa Prize.
Congress Vice President: Rita Carsetti
Rita Carsetti is the Head of the Diagnostic Immunology Unit and of the B cell pathophysiology Research Unit of the Bambino Gesù Children Hospital IRCCS in Rome. She has spent a large part of her scientific career in Germany, at the Max-Planck for Immunobiology in Freiburg. Thanks to the long experience in basic research combined with the clinical involvement, she has contributed to the understanding of important basic mechanisms of human B cell biology and function in health and disease. In the last years, she has been involved in several projects related to the development of the immune system in children and adults and the changes due to different types of immunodeficiency. She is also involved in increasing the knowledge and public awareness on vaccines and vaccination and collaborates with patient associations. She is a founding member of the Europe
iUIS President & Scientific Programme Committee Co-Chair: Miriam Merad
Miriam Merad, M.D.; Ph.D. is the Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York (prism) and the Director of the Mount Sinai Human Immune Monitoring Center.
Dr. Merad is an internationally acclaimed physician-scientist and a leader in the fields of dendritic cell and macrophage biology with a focus on their contribution to human diseases. Dr. Merad identified the tissue resident macrophage lineage and revealed its distinct role in organ physiology and pathophysiology. She established the contribution of this macrophage lineage to cancer progression and inflammatory diseases and is now working on the development of novel macrophage-targeted therapies for these conditions. In addition to her work on macrophages.
Dr. Merad is known for her work on dendritic cells, a group of cells that control adaptive immunity. She identified a new subset of dendritic cells, which is now considered a key target of antiviral and antitumor immunity.
Dr. Merad has authored more than 280 primary papers and reviews in high profile journals. Her work has been cited several thousand times. She receives generous funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research on innate immunity and their contribution to human disease, and belongs to several NIH consortia. She is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the recipient of the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology. In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of her contributions to the field of innate immunity.
She is the president elect of IUIS
Scientific Programme Committee Chair: Mark Davis
Mark M. Davis is the Director of the Stanford Institute for Immunology, Transplantation and Infection (ITI), a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He later was a postdoctoral and staff fellow at the Laboratory of Immunology at NIH and then became a faculty member in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he remains today. Dr. Davis is well known for identifying many of the T-cell receptor genes, which are responsible for the ability of these cells to recognize a diverse repertoire of antigens. Current research interests involve understanding the molecular interactions that underlie T cell recognition and the challenges of human immunology, specifically a “systems level” understanding of an immune response to vaccination or infection.
IUIS Past President: Faith Osier
Faith Osier is the Past President of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS). She has won multiple international prizes for her research in understanding the mechanisms of immunity against Plasmodium falciparum in man. She aims to translate this knowledge into highly effective vaccines against malaria. She is Visiting Professor of Malaria Immunology in the Nuffield Dept of Medicine, Oxford University, holds the prestigious Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander Humboldt Foundation and an EDCTP Senior Fellowship. In 2014, she won the Royal Society Pfizer Prize, UK. She holds major research grants from the Wellcome Trust and is an MRC/DfID African Research Leader. She is passionate about capacity building and the training of African scientists to deliver the interventions needed on the continent.
Congress Patron: Siamon Gordon
Siamon Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied medicine at the University of Cape Town. He is known for his work on the phenotypic and functional diversity of macrophages.After his doctorate in the laboratory of Zanvil Cohn at Rockefeller University, he moved to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford in 1976 where his group identified the pan-macrophage marker F4/80 and the lectin, Dectin-1. He initiated an AIDS education project in South Africa through a cartoon book aimed at 12-year olds.He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007 and explores macrophage history through Elie Metchnikoff.
