SFI 2019

S. Fillatreau studied at Ecole Normale Superieure de la rue d’Ulm (France). He then did his PhD in the laboratory of Prof. David Gray (The University of Edinburgh, U.K.). From 2003 to 2015, he was group leader in “Immune Regulation” at the Deutsches Rheuma-Forschungszentrum Berlin, a Leibniz Institute (Germany). Since 2015, he is Professor of Imunology at the Université Paris Descartes (UFR Paris 5) with an affiliation at the Laboratory of Biological Immunology at Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades (France). Since 2016, he is AXA Professor in Translation Immunology at Hôpital Necker-Enfants-Malades (France). He received the GlaxoSmithKline Stiftung Wissenschaftspreise in 2015. His main interests concern the role of the adaptive immune system in health and disease, particularly in chronic immune-mediated and infectious diseases. Current work focuses on the antibody-independent functions of B cells and plasma cells, as well as on the therapeutic utilization of CD4+Foxp3+ T regulatory cells in autoimmune diseases.

Prof. Dr. Anne Müller studied Microbiology at the Univ of Würzburg and holds a PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany. After post-doctoral research in the lab of Prof. Stanley Falkow at Stanford University, she was recruited to the University of Zurich, Institute of Molecular Cancer Research, where she studies the pathogenesis of chronic bacterial infection, bacteria as a cause of human cancer, immunomodulation by bacteria and the pathogenesis of lymphomas of both infectious and non-infectious causes. She serves on the Board of Directors of her Institute and of the Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of Zürich.

Dr. Derk Amsen did his PhD on T cell tolerance at the Netherlands Cancer Institute with Dr. Ada Kruisbeek and a postdoc with Dr. Richard Flavell at Yale University. His research group at Sanquin (the Dutch blood bank), studies the signals and genetic circuits governing differentiation, function and lineage stability of effector and memory T cells as well as of human regulatory T cells with the ultimate aim to develop adoptive T cell therapies.

Sophie Laffont received her PhD in 2007 at Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse) where she studied mechanisms regulating alloreactive CD4 T cell responses. She was then a post-doc fellow at Oxford University in the lab of Fiona Powrie where she contributed to characterize intestinal dendritic cells. In 2014, Sophie obtained a permanent position at CNRS and since then her research areas aim at identifying mechanisms responsible for sex-related differences in innate immune responses, with a special focus on DCs and ILCs.

Sophie Ugolini is a team leader at the Centre d'immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML). Her research interests include biology of inflammation, innate immunity, immune responses to pathogens and tumors. Recently, she has been awarded by an ERC grant to address challenging questions on the role of the nervous system on immunity. Her lab has identified neuroendocrine-immune pathways playing a crucial role for host protection from infection and immunopathology.

Dirk Brenner is a biochemst by training and obtained his diploma from the University of Witten/Herdecke (Germany). After his graduation he joined the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ-Heidelberg, Germnay) for his PhD-studies. Following a postdoctoral phase at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto, Canada. He was recruited to Luxembourg Institute of Health where he is a Deputy Chair of the Department of Infection & Immunity and leading his own research lab. His research is focused on the metabolic control of immune cell subsets in mediating and mitigating inflammation.

Prof. Birgit Sawitzki is the scientific director of the Research Center of Immunosciences at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. Additionally, she is a group leader at the Institute of Medical Immunology. She was Council member of the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT). Her research focusses on molecular mechanisms of effector T cell differentiation and function of regulatory T cells in preclinical models and transplant patients. She has published more than 100 articles and currently holds an associate editor position at the American Journal of Transplantation and Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Since 2015 Full Professor – Chair, Division of Animal Physiology and Immunology, Technical University of Munich, Germany
2009-2015 Assistant Professor, Service d'immunologie et allergie – CHUV, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
2004-2009 Senior Research Fellow, Laboratory of M. J. Bevan, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
2000-2004 MD-PhD Student, Charite, Humboldt-University Berlin
1996-2004 Medical School, Charite, Humboldt-University Berlin

I hold an engineer degree from Ecole Polytechnique, a M.Sc. in cancer science and a PhD in immunology from Paris-Sud University. I trained as a postdoc at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, USA), working on B cell memory. In 2014, I joined the Centre for Immunology of Marseille-Luminy (CIML, Marseille, France) to study B cell immunity and lymphomas. Since 2018, I lead the ‘Integrative B cell Immunology’ team at CIML, at the crossroads of cellular immunology, single-cell genomics, and bioinformatics.

Dr. Andrei Zinovyev is a senior researcher and scientific coordinator of Computational Systems Biology of Cancer group inside Bioinformatics of Cancer department of Institut Curie. His main research interest is in application of machine learning in cancer biology. Since 2019, he holds an interdisciplinary chair in PRAIRIE (Paris Artificial Intelligence Research Institute) with the topics of studying high-dimensional geometries of the multi-level single-cell datasets.

Olivier Thaunat is Professor in Nephrology and Clinical Immunology in Lyon University Hospital (France). He obtained his MD in renal medicine from the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France) in 2004. He specialised in Transplant Immunology and obtained a PhD in Immunology in 2008 for his work elucidating the role of lymphoid neogenesis in chronic rejection. Since 2012 he hold a tenure position in the Department of Nephrology, Transplantation and Clinical Immunology of Edouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon (France) and he is the head of a research group at the INSERM U1111 aiming at Establishing new Strategies to Prevent Rejection In Transplantation (ESPRIT).

BSc MBBCh PhD FRCP
NIHR Research Professor
Reader in Immunity and Inflammation. University of Cambridge, UK.
Honorary Consultant Nephrologist. Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK.
Email: mrc38@cam.ac.uk
Website: http://www.med.cam.ac.uk/clatworthy/

Menna Clatworthy is a PI in the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge and works as an Honorary Consultant Nephrologist. Her basic research focuses on humoral immunity and the impact of the tissue environment in shaping local immune responses. Her clinical/translational research interests are in renal transplantation and using novel immunosuppressants to target humoral immunity. She is also an active participant in the Human Cell Atlas Project (https://www.humancellatlas.org), utilizing single cell technologies to better understand the cellular landscape of the human kidney.

Miriam Merad, M.D.; Ph.D. is the Mount Sinai Chair professor in Cancer Immunology and the Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Dr. Merad also co-Directs, the Cancer Immunology program at The Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute and is the Director of the Mount Sinai Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC).
Dr. Merad’s research over the past 20 years has focused on understanding the mechanisms that control the development and functional identity of tissue resident dendritic cells and macrophages during homeostasis, and examining how these regulations are changed in cancer and inflammatory diseases. The overarching goal of her laboratory is to identify dysregulated pathways in macrophages and dendritic cells that can be harnessed to treat Cancer and Inflammatory diseases using both genetically engineered mouse models and human lesions to address these questions. To expand the understanding of immune cells contribution to human lesions, she founded in 2009, the human immune monitoring center at Mount Sinai to implement technology platforms to maximize information obtained from limited biological samples. In 2016, she has taken the leadership of the Precision Immunology Institute at the icahn School of Medicine (PrIISM) to continue to lead initiatives to enhance human immunology science. PrIISM integrates immunological research programs with synergistic expertise in biology, medicine, technology, physics, mathematics and computational biology which come together to frame novel questions to understand the contribution of immune cells to disease initiation, progression and response to treatment, to implement cutting edge technologies and to develop novel immunotherapy strategies for the treatment of human diseases.
Dr. Merad has authored more than 180 primary papers and reviews in high profile journals. 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.

Alexandre Boissonnas is an immunologist working for the French National Institute of Medical Research (Inserm). During his PhD, he studied the role of antigens in the homeostasis of peripheral T lymphocytes. He then joined Sebastian Amigorena‘s lab at Institut Curie-Paris to develop a new approach to study leukocyte dynamics using two-photon live imaging. In 2009, he joined the CIMI-Paris and focuses his investigations on the interactions between Treg and the mononuclear phagocyte system in inflammatory pathologies and cancer.

Éric Tartour is MD, PhD and Professor of Immunology at the Faculty of Medicine Paris Descartes. He is currently responsible of the laboratory of immunology at Hopital Europeen Georges Pompidou where his team has developed an immunomonitoring platform for cancer immunotherapy. He is also leading an INSERM team at the PARCC research center with main topics on ‘angiogenesis and immunity’ and discovery of ‘predictive biomarker related to tumor microenvironment’.

Céline Delaloy obtained her PhD in Human genetics from UPMC in 2006. Her basic research efforts are focused on characterizing the molecular and cellular processes controlling gene expression and cell fate determination in pathophysiological models. After completing a postdoctoral training in Gladstone Institutes, UCSF, where she studied epigenetic mechanisms involved in neuronal differentiation, she was recruited by INSERM in 2013. In the U1236 lab, she explores signal integration and B cell responses to external cues directing plasma cell differentiation.

Julia Jellusova worked during her doctoral training under the mentorship of Prof. Lars Nitschke at the University of Erlangen, Germany and conducted her postdoctoral training with Prof. Robert Rickert at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, USA. She is currently a Junior Group Leader at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany and a PI in the Signalling Research Centres BIOSS and CIBSS. The work of her group focuses on investigating the regulation of cell metabolism by intracellular signaling pathways and metabolic adaptations in B cells.

Prof. D. Merkler studied medicine in Zürich, Switzerland and started his research in the laboratory of Prof. M. Schwab (University/ETH of Zürich) in the field of neuroregeneration. As a postdoctoral fellow in Martin Schwab’s laboratory, he received an SNF scholarship to participate in the postgraduate course in experimental medicine and biology (Prof. Zapf). In 2003 he joint the Department of Neuropathology headed by Prof. W. Brück at the the University Hospital Göttingen where he was trained as a specialist in neuropathology. He further worked as visiting scientist at the Institute for Experimental Immunology (Profs. R. Zinkernagel / H. Hengartner) and in 2010 he was awarded as SNF Professorship at the University of Geneva. In 2016, Doron Merkler was appointed as Associate Professor at the University and University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland. His research focuses on the study of the pathogenic and protective functions of cytotoxic T cells in autoimmune and viral CNS disease conditions.

Professor Roland Liblau is currently Professor of Clinical Immunology and Director of Toulouse-Purpan Pathophysiology Research Center (https://www.cptp.inserm.fr/en) in Toulouse, France. Professor Liblau has a clinical background in Neurology and doctoral and post-doctoral training in Immunology. He conducts research on the pathogenesis of neuroimmunological diseases using both novel animal models and study of patients’ biological samples. His research focuses on multiple sclerosis, paraneoplastic neurological diseases, neuro-IRIS, narcolepsy and more recently Susac syndrome. Professor Liblau has published over 180 peer-reviewed papers, including a large number in top-tier journals. He was president of the French Society for Immunology for 3 years (2010-2012).

Professor Alexander Flügel took up his current position at the Georg-August University Göttingen as Director of the Institute for Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis Research in 2008. His main research interest is the mechanisms and factors that allow immune cells to enter the central nervous system, to communicate in this milieu and to influence brain tissue, particularly in relation to multiple sclerosis. He is an expert in applying and optimizing intravital imaging technologies such as two-photon laser scanning microscopy to analyze the autoimmune attack of the CNS in models of experimental autoimmune encephalitis (EAE), an animal model for multiple sclerosis.

As a graduate student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, with Dr. Francesca Levi-Schaffer; a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen J. Galli; and as a current principal investigator at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, I have accumulated more than 20 years of experience investigating inflammatory processes involving mast cells and myeloid cells, including allergic inflammation and inflammation during sepsis. My overall goal is to understand how we control the response of our immune system to bacterial infections. These mechanisms of control prevent the dysregulation of the immune response that can lead to sepsis, the main cause of death in the elderly and young children, and for which there is no current treatment.