PLENARY
SPEAKERS
Biography
Imen Ben-Mustapha is a Professor of Immunology. She received her M.D. from the University of Tunis and her M.Sc. from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. She completed a research fellowship at the Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases, INSERM U550, in Paris.
In 2008, she joined the Medical School of the University of Tunis El Manar and the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, where she has served as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and, since 2018, Full Professor in Immunology. She currently leads the national reference diagnostic laboratory for patients with inborn errors of immunity (IEI) at the Pasteur Institute of Tunis. Dr. Ben-Mustapha is also a member of the National Immunization Technical Advisory Group.
Her research has contributed to the discovery of several new genes and modes of inheritance associated with IEI. Her current work focuses on uncovering the immunological mechanisms underlying IEI with atypical presentation of. She was awarded the University of Montreal/Besrour Prize for Excellence in Research.
Biography
Christoph Bock is a principal investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, professor of medical informatics and head of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the Medical University of Vienna. His research combines experimental biology (high-throughput sequencing, epigenetics, CRISPR screening, bioengineering) with computational methods (bioinformatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) – for cancer, immunology, and precision medicine. Before coming to Vienna in 2012, he was a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (2008-2011) and a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2004-2008). Christoph Bock is also scientific coordinator of the Biomedical Sequencing Facility of CeMM and MedUni Vienna, member of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and elected board member of the Young Academy in the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has received important research awards, including an ERC Starting Grant (2016-2021), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021-2026), the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (2009), the Overton Prize of the International Society for Computational Biology (2017), and the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022).
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. Xuetao Cao is the Professor and Director of Center for Immunotherapy, Founder Director of National Key Laboratory of Medical Immunology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China, and Honorary President of Chinese Society for Immunology (CSI). He was past President of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, past President of Peking Union Medical College, past President of Nankai University. Dr. Cao is the fellow of US National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, French Academy of Medicine, UK Academy of Medical Sciences. Dr. Cao’s research interests are innate immunity and inflammation, tumor immunology and immunotherapy.
Biography
Emmanuelle Charpentier was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for her joint work with Jennifer Doudna onthe development of a method for genome editing. This technology, known as CRISPR-Cas, is revolutionizing research in the life sciences. CRISPR-Cas has opened entirely new possibilities in biotechnology and biomedical gene therapies that have an impact on society and humanity. Charpentier is Scientific and Managing Director at the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. Charpentier has devoted most of her scientific career to understanding the fundamental mechanisms of diseases, with a particular interest in infections caused by Gram-positive pathogenic bacteria such as Listeria, staphylococci and streptococci.
Biography
Dr Nico Gaudenzio is Research Director at the French national institute of health (Inserm) and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at the biotech Genoskin (Toulouse FRA, Salem MA USA). Nico received a Master’s in bioengineering and a PhD in Immunology at the University of Toulouse, France and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Stanford (CA USA). His work has contributed substantially to identifying molecular and cellular targets involved in allergic and non-allergic inflammation. Nico currently leads a large research program to investigate the role of neuroimmune interactions in health and disease. He is three times Laureate of the European Research Council and has received international prizes such as the ACTERIA Early Career Research Prize by the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS 2021) and the Rising Star Award by the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS 2023).
Biography
Jen received her Ph.D. (Immunology) at the University of Toronto in 1998. She went on to do a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School studying the complement pathway and then joined Biogen Inc. as a Staff Scientist in 2000. During her tenure at Biogen, she became interested in B cells, Multiple Sclerosis and the TNF superfamily of molecules. After 3 years in Industry, she returned to Academia as an Assistant Professor (Immunology) at the University of Toronto in 2003 and in 2015 was promoted to full Professor, and in 2023 she assumed the position of Department Chair. Jen’s basic research continues to focus on how members of the TNF superfamily of molecules regulate immunity and autoimmunity. Her team has uncovered a novel gut-brain axis that regulates neuroinflammation. With respect to translational work, Dr. Gommerman has been examining the role of B lymphocytes in Multiple Sclerosis patients and in animal models of MS. Her contributions to understanding the mucosal antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 resulted in her co-leading a biomanufacturing and pandemic preparedness efforts for a hub of 8 Ontario Universities (HI3). Jen has won multiple mentorship awards from the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and holds a Canada Research Chair in Tissue- specific Immunity.
Biography
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.
Biography
Xiaoyu Hu received her Bachelor of Medicine degree from Peking University and her Ph.D. in immunology from Cornell University. She is currently a Professor at Westlake University School of Medicine and a Professor at the Institute for Immunology, Tsinghua University in China. Dr. Hu’s research focuses on understanding the physiological and pathological functions of tissue resident myeloid cells, particularly macrophages and mast cells. She is the recipient of multiple awards including Christina Fleischmann Award to Young Women Investigators from International Cytokine & Interferon Society and Newton Advanced Fellowship from the U.K. Royal Society. She was listed among the ‘50 scientists that inspire’ during the Cell Press 50th anniversary event in 2024 and was one of five female immunologists featured by Nature Immunology. Dr. Hu has received personalized interviews for Journal of Experimental Medicine and the Society of Leukocyte Biology. She holds editorial positions with journals such as Immunity, Trends in Immunology, Science Advances, and Mucosal Immunology. She co-organized international conferences including Cell Symposia and Cold Spring Harbor meetings. Dr. Hu actively advocates for women in science by composing essays for journals and societies and promoting fellow female scientists.
Biography
Dr. Bo Huang is a professor and the deputy chairman of the Department of Immunology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College. His research focuses on tumor immunology, immunotherapy, metabolism, mechano-medicine, and tumor cell microparticles. As a corresponding author, he published many high-impact research papers in Science, Sci Immunol, Sci Transl Med, Cancer Cell, Mol Cell, Nat Mater, Nat Immunol (4x), Nat Cell Biol (4x), Nat Biomed Eng (2x), and others. He developed drug-packaging tumor cell microparticles，which have been approved by Chinese government to treat malignant pleural effusions and ascites in cancer patients with high efficacy and safety.
Biography
Work of the Jung lab aims at elucidating in vivo aspects of mononuclear phagocytes, including development and differential functions of monocytes and macrophages. Specifically, the team applies intra-vital imaging, conditional cell and gene ablation, combined with advanced genomic analyses to investigate the biology of these cells in physiological health and disease context. Recent focus is given to the study of blood monocyte subsets, monocyte-derived intestinal and pulmonary macrophages, as well as brain macrophages, including microglia and CNS border-associated macrophages.
Biography
Dr. Vijay Kuchroo is the Samuel L. Wasserstrom Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Senior Scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Co-Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, Brigham Research Institutes, Boston. Vijay Kuchroo is also an Institute member of the Broad Institute and a senior investigator at Klarman Cell Observatory project and Food Allergy Scientific Initiative (FASI) project. He is the founding Director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His major research interests include autoimmune diseases – particularly the role of co-stimulation – the genetic basis of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis and multiple sclerosis, and cell surface molecules and regulatory factors that regulate induction of T cell tolerance and dysfunction. His laboratory has made several transgenic mice that serve as animal models for human multiple sclerosis. His laboratory also first described TIM family of genes and identified Tim-3 as an inhibitory receptor expressed on T cells, which is now being exploited for cancer immunotherapy. He was first to describe the development of a highly pathogenic Th17 cells which has been shown to induce multiple different autoimmune diseases in humans. A paper describing development of Th17 authored by Dr. Kuchroo has been one of the highest cited papers in Immunology.
Biography
Dr Laura Mackay completed her PhD from The University of Birmingham, UK (2009) and postdoctoral training with Dr Francis Carbone at The University of Melbourne (2009-2015). She is currently Professor and Immunology Theme Lead at The Peter Doherty Institute. She is a NHMRC Leadership Investigator, Dame Kate Campbell Fellow, HHMI International Scholar and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, recipient of Awards including The Prime Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year (Australia) and she is Past President of The Federation of Immunological Societies of Asia-Oceania (FIMSA). Dr Mackay’s research centres on immunological memory. Her work was instrumental in characterising tissue-resident memory T (TRM) cells and the molecular pathways that drive their development, and demonstrating the role of TRM cells in infection and cancer control. Her Laboratory focuses on the molecular regulation of tissue T cell generation and function, with a view to harness these cells for new immunotherapeutic strategies against disease.
Biography
Dr. Mathis obtained a PhD from the University of Rochester and performed postdoctoral studies at the Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Eucaryotes in Strasbourg, France and at Stanford University Medical Center. She returned to Strasbourg at the end of 1983, establishing a laboratory at the LGME [later the Institut de Genetique et de Biologie Moleculare et Cellulaire (IGBMC)] in conjunction with Dr. Christophe Benoist. The lab moved to the Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston in 1999. Through 2008, Dr. Mathis was a Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Associate Research Director and Head of the Section on Immunology and Immunogenetics at Joslin.
Dr. Mathis is currently a Professor in the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School, and holder of the Morton Grove-Rasmussen Chair in Immunohematology. She is also an Associate Faculty Member of the Broad Institute. She presently serves on Advisory Boards of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Genentech, Pfizer and Amgen (amongst others) and of several research institutes worldwide.
Her lab works in the fields of T cell differentiation, autoimmunity and inflammation. She has trained over 150 students and postdoctoral fellows.
Dr. Mathis was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2003, the German Academy in 2007, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. She received the FASEB Excellence in Science Award in 2016.
Dr. Mathis is also an active member of the Committee on Immunology at Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute, the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
Biography
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
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
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Winfried F. PICKL is Professor of Translational Immunology and specialist in clinical immunology (Medical University of Vienna) with several years of international research experience (Harvard Medical School). He is Speaker of the PhD Program Molecular, Cellular and Clinical Allergology, MCCA; Head of the Department of Cellular Immunology and Immunohematology and the Immunodiagnostic Laboratory at the Institute of Immunology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. He is and has been active in national and international boards and committees, e.g., as President of the Austrian Society for Allergology and Immunology, ÖGAI (2014-2016); Council Member of the International Union of Immunological Societies, IUIS (2014-2019); Treasurer of the European Federation of Immunological Societies, EFIS (2016-2024). The Pickl Laboratory is interested in better understanding the mechanisms governing the formation of the immunological synapse between antigen-presenting cells and T cells, as it is one of the keys to obtain deeper insights into adaptive immune responses. In this context, virus-like particles decorated with immune receptors of choice are used as surrogate antigen-presenting platforms and lab-generated humanized allergy mice are being applied to investigate questions of differentiation, regulation, immune deviation and clonal deletion of pathology-inducing T cells.
Biography
Gabriel Rabinovich (PhD) is Director of the Laboratory of Glycomedicine at the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine, Senior Investigator of the Argentinean National Research Council (CONICET) and Full Professor of Immunology at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. He is Member of the US National Academy of Science (NAS), European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), Latin American Academy of Science, Third World Academy of Science (TWAS) and Argentinean Academy of Science. His laboratory is interested in understanding the function of glycans and glycan-binding proteins in cellular processes relevant to immune regulation in health and disease. Together with his team, he demonstrated that galectins, a family of β-galactoside-binding proteins, can translate glycan-encoded information into novel regulatory programs that control inflammation, suppress autoimmune pathology and allow cancer cells to evade immune responses and promote angiogenesis. His findings opened new therapeutic possibilities in cancer, chronic inflammation and autoimmune diseases.
Biography
Caetano Reis e Sousa obtained a BSc Hons in Biology in 1989 from Imperial College London, and a DPhil in Immunology in 1992 from the University of Oxford. He subsequently trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, USA, with Ron Germain.
In 1998 he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, later re-named Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, where he headed the Immunobiology Laboratory. His laboratory became part of the Francis Crick Institute in 2015.
He is currently a Principal Group Leader and Assistant Research Director at the Crick and Head of the Immunobiology Laboratory. He is also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and King’s College London and Honorary Professor at University College London.
Reis e Sousa’s contributions have been widely recognised and he is included in the list of Highly Cited Researchers (2014-present) and has won the BD Biosciences Prize of the European Macrophage and Dendritic Cell Society (2002), the Liliane Bettencourt for Life Sciences Award (2008), the Award for Excellence in Basic/Translational Research from the European Society for Clinical Investigation (2011), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2017) and the Bial Award in Biomedicine (2019). He is co-founder of Adendra Therapeutics (2021).
He is a fellow of the Royal Society (elected 2019), fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences (elected 2006), fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (elected 2024), a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO; elected 2006) and was made an Officer of the Order of Sant’Iago da Espada by the government of Portugal, his home country, in 2009.
Biography
Prof. Asya Rolls is a researcher in the life science department at TAU. She studies how the brain regulates immunity and how mental states can reflect in the organism’s ability to cope with disease. Rolls is the recipient of several ERC grants (Starting, Consolidator, and POC) from the European Research Council and was selected as one of 40 International Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust (2018-2023).
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
Emma Slack has been a full professor of mucosal immunology at ETH Zurich since 2022 and a statutory professor of molecular mucosal immunology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford since 2023. She started her scientific journey working on pattern recognition receptor signaling as a PhD student in the laboratory of Caetano Reis e Sousa at the London Research Institute and has progressively followed the question of how the immune system recognizes infectious challenge from the clean, sterile environment of the spleen out to the very complex, heavily colonized environment of the gut lumen. After working as a postdoctoral fellow with Andrew Macpherson at McMaster University in Canada, she become a junior group leader within the group of Prof. Wolf-Dietrich Hardt at the ETH Zurich. Her work on elucidating the mechanisms of action of secretory IgA in the gut and applying this knowledge to improve oral vaccination has been awarded with several prizes, including the ETH Latsis prize 2017 and a European Federation of Immunological Societies Lecture Award 2022.
Biography
Osamu Takeuchi is a professor at the Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, specializing in innate immunity. His current research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms of post-transcriptional regulation in the immune system, particularly through the role of RNA-binding proteins such as Regnase-1.
Biography
Mauro Teixeira is Professor of Immunobiology and head of Center for advanced and Innovative Therapies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. He is currently the president of the International Association of Inflammation Societies (IAIS). HIs work focuses on the control and resolution of the inflammatory response by pro-resolving molecules and their potential as novel anti-inflammatory drugs, especially in the context of infectious diseases.
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.