Speakers
Regulation of Barrier Immunity
David Artis, Ph.D.
Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City, USA
Dr. Artis completed his doctoral research training at the University of Manchester, UK focusing on regulation of immunity and inflammation in the intestine. Following receipt of a Wellcome Trust Prize Traveling Fellowship, he undertook his post-doctoral fellowship training at the University of Pennsylvania where he continued his research training in examining the regulation of immune responses at barrier surfaces. Dr. Artis joined the faculty at Penn in 2005 and became a Professor of Microbiology in 2014.
Dr. Artis moved to Cornell University and became the inaugural Michael Kors Professor of Immunology and Director of the Jill Roberts Institute for IBD Research at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University in New York City in 2014. Dr. Artis subsequently assumed the role of inaugural Director of the Friedman Center for Nutrition and Inflammation to launch of the Friedman Center for Nutrition and Inflammation at WCM.
Dr. Artis has developed a research program focused on dissecting the pathways that regulate innate and adaptive immune cell function and host-microbiota interactions at barrier surfaces in the context of health and disease. He has also pioneered multidisciplinary approaches to dissect cellular and molecular pathways that control the gut-brain axis, including single nucleus sequencing, untargeted metabolomics, CRISPR targeting of the microbiota and chemo- and optogenetic tools to manipulate the nervous system. His research program also encompasses a significant effort to translate research findings in pre-clinical models into patient-based studies of immune-mediated diseases.
Dr. Artis has published more than 180 peer-reviewed primary and review papers with an H-index of 94 with more than 44,000 citations. He has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2004 and also receives support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation and the Paul Allen Foundation. He has been the recipient of Investigator Awards from the American Association of Immunology, the International Cytokine Society and Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation including the Colyton Prize, the Bill Paul Award for Outstanding Research, the Stanley Cohen Prize and the AAI-BD Biosciences Investigator Award.
The Epithelial-Immune Axis: Key to Immune Homeostasis
Gabrielle Belz
University of Queensland, Australia
Gabrielle Belz originally trained in veterinary medicine and surgery and received her PhD in understanding the organisation of lymphatics and lymphoid tissues at The University of Queensland. After a short stint in Canada to work on B cells, she moved to St Jude Children's Research Hospital to work with Peter Doherty supported by an NHMRC CJ Martin Fellowship. Here she established a number of systems that now allow tracking of virus-specific T cells and established the paradigm changing notion that CD4 T cell help was required for generating antiviral responses. She returned to The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and uncovered the identity of the key dendritic cells necessary for initiating antiviral infections. Subsequently she was awarded the Burnet Prize and NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Fellowship. Her research contributions have been recognized by a number of awards including a Wellcome Trust Overseas Fellowship, HHMI international fellowship, ARC Future fellowship, Doctor of Veterinary Science and the Gottschalk Medal (Australian Academy of Science). Her laboratory focuses on deciphering the key cellular and transcriptional signals of protective immunity particularly by T cells and in understanding how innate immune cells develop and make novel contributions to mucosal immune defence.
RORC-positive antigen-presenting cells: comparing human RORC-ILC3 and RORC-DC
Marco Colonna
Washington University in St Louis, USA
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-α/β 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 and cancer.
Defining signals that dictate ILC fate and function
James Di Santo
Pasteur
Institute, Paris, France
James Di Santo received MD and PhD degrees from Cornell Medical College and the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York and completed postdoctoral training with Pr Alain Fischer (Necker Hospital, Paris, France) and Pr Klaus Rajewsky (Institute for Genetics, Cologne, Germany). In 1999, he created his own lab at the Institut Pasteur in Paris where he currently holds the position of Professor in the Immunology Department and Research Director within the French Medical Research Institute (Inserm). Pr. Di Santo’s main scientific interests are in the areas of lymphocyte biology, cytokines, transcription factors and signaling pathways in the development and function of both adaptive (T and B cell) and innate (ILC, NK cells) lymphocytes in mice and man. His laboratory has developed a series of human immune system mouse models that allow for an in-depth analysis of human immunity in a pre-clinical setting, with applications for treatment of human infectious diseases. More recently, he has developed an integrated systems immunology approach using nasal swab samples to assess human mucosal immunity in healthy individuals and in patients suffering from respiratory diseases.
Andreas Diefenbach
Charité Hospital, Berlin, Germany
Andreas Diefenbach studied Medicine at the University of Erlangen. After obtaining his doctoral degree in Microbiology and Immunology, he undertook postdoctoral training at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California Berkeley. He held faculty positions at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University, at the University of Freiburg and at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz. Since 2016, Andreas Diefenbach is Professor and Chair of the Institute of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Immunology at Charité and the Founding Director of the Berlin Centre for the Biology of Health, a joint research institute of Charité and Free University Berlin devoted to understanding the molecular mechanisms that maintain health. He also is a Senior Group Leader at the German Rheumatism Research Center, A Leibniz Institute. His lab studies development and function of the innate immune system and is particularly interested in understanding how the innate immune system coordinates adaptation of multicellular organisms to their environments (e.g., microbiota, nutrients). Research in the Diefenbach laboratory is supported by the European Research Council (ERC-StG-2012; ERC-AdG-2021) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). He is the coordinator of the DFG Priority Program 1937 (“Innate Lymphoid Cells”). Andreas is an elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.
Local differentiation of ILC1 during ontogeny and infection
Georg Gasteiger
University of Wuerzburg, Germany
Georg Gasteiger is a full professor and cofounder of the Wuerzburg Institute and Max-Planck Research Group of Systems Immunology (https://www.med.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/systemimmunologie). He studied Medicine and specialized in Medical Microbiology and Virology in Munich, followed by a Postdoc at MSKCC in New York.
Georg investigates the biology of tissue-resident lymphocytes, including innate lymphoid cells (ILCs), NK cells and memory T cells. He is interested in the differentiation of ILCs during ontogeny, and how the ILC compartment and ILC tissue niches are reorganized during infection and inflammatory challenges.
ILC2 in tissue and immune homeostasis
Tim Halim
CRUK,
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Tim Halim is a group leader at the University of Cambridge, Cancer Research UK – Cambridge Institute. He did his PhD training in the laboratory of Prof. Takei at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), followed by a postdoc with Dr. Andrew McKenzie at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK). He contributed to the characterization of ILC2 in the airways, and their role in promoting allergic inflammation by engaging both innate and adaptive arms of the immune system. His laboratory continues investigating the cellular and molecular interactions whereby ILC2 locally regulate different aspects of the immune response in cancer, tissue homeostasis and inflammatory diseases. Besides CRUK funding, Tim has been supported by CIHR Banting postdoctoral and Wellcome Sir Henry Dale independent research fellowships.
Ym2 protein as an activator of ILC2’s
Bart Lambrecht
VIB-UGent, Center for Inflammation Research (IRC), Belgium
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 centred 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.
Stromal immune interactions at the airway wall
Clare Lloyd
Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Clare Lloyd is Head of the Respiratory Division at the National Heart & Lung Institute in London. She trained in immunology at Kings College London and undertook Postdoctoral research at Guys Hospital London and Harvard Medical School, Boston. She worked in a Biotech company in Cambridge USA, investigating the functions of type2 molecules in different disease models. She returned to the UK to start her own group and has been funded by serial Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowships. Clare’s research examines the mechanisms underlying the immune response to inhaled allergens, pathogens and pollutants. Work in her lab investigates how the immune system senses the inhaled environment, examining how different stimuli influence development of pulmonary inflammation and tissue remodelling across the life course, using mouse models, imaging, cell biology and transcriptomics. She is Vice Dean for Institutional Affairs in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College, taking leading on EDI and career development. Clare is an elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Medical Sciences.
Richard Locksley
University of California, San Francisco, USA
Dr. Locksley is the Director of the Sandler Asthma Basic Research Center (SABRE) and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology & Immunology. He received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Harvard and his M.D. from the University of Rochester. After completing his residency at UCSF, he trained in infectious diseases at the University of Washington. Prior to his position as director of the SABRE Center, Dr. Locksley served 18 years as the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at UCSF Medical Center. Dr. Locksley is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Locksley's laboratory addresses the immune cells and tissue responses that occur during allergic, or type 2, immunity. This includes the processes by which naïve helper T cells differentiate to become allergy-supporting Th2 cells, but also the interactions of these cells with eosinophils, basophils, mast cells and alternatively activated macrophages that mediate activities in peripheral tissues. The laboratory increasingly focuses on innate immunity, particularly since the discovery of Group 2 innate lymphoid cells, or ILC2s, which are prominently involved in allergy. Importantly, the discovery of ILC2s initiated efforts to uncover the ‘ground state’ of allergy by investigating homeostatic pathways involving these cells that might provide insights regarding their primary function in the immune system and in homeostasis.
Regulation of human ILC plasticity and differentiation
Jenny Mjösberg
Karolinska
Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
Jenny Mjösberg was appointed Professor of Tissue Immunology at Department of Medicine, Huddinge on 1 July 2022.
She studied biomedical chemistry at Kalmar University, graduating in 2003, and went on to earn her PhD in clinical immunology at Linköping University in 2010. She did her postdoc research at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, between 2010 and 2012, after which she transferred to KI, where she began to lead her own research group in 2014. From 2016 to 2019 she was also engaged part-time as a lecturer at Linköping University.
Jenny Mjösberg was made docent in 2019 and has received several awards, including a Swedish Research Council Consolidator Grant in 2019, an ERC Starting Grant in 2020 and a KI Consolidator Grant in 2022.
ILCs: tissue lymphocyte - stromal cell neighborhood OGs
Ari Molofsky
University of California, San Francisco, USA
Dr. Ari Molofsky is an Associate Professor at UCSF in the Department of Laboratory Medicine. He is trained as an MD/PhD with a clinical specialization in hematopathology. His primary focus is conducting a basic research laboratory that works at the intersection of immunology and tissue homeostasis/pathology. He is also a member of the UCSF Microbiology and Immunology Department and the UCSF Diabetes Center.
The role of group 2 innate lymphoid cells in ulcerative colitis
Kazuyo Moro
Osaka University, Japan
Dr. Kazuyo Moro graduated from Nihon University School of Dentistry in 2003. She obtained her Ph.D. from Keio University School of Medicine in 2010 for her achievement in discovering group 2 innate lymphoid cells. After completing her doctoral studies, she continued her research as a postdoctoral fellow at Keio University School of Medicine. In 2012, she transitioned to RIKEN IMS Laboratory for Immune cell systems, where she served as a senior researcher and sub-team leader. By 2015, she had been promoted to team leader for the Laboratory for Innate Immune Systems within RIKEN. In 2019, Dr. Moro was appointed as a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at the Graduate School of Medicine Osaka University.
Currently, she is actively involved in research at both RIKEN and Osaka University laboratories, focusing on various aspects of ILC2 (group 2 innate lymphoid cells) differentiation, regulatory mechanisms, and their roles in allergies, fibrosis, infections, and inflammatory diseases.
Modulation of the intestinal cellular environment by ILC-derived TGF-beta
Joana Neves
Kings College London, United
Kingdom
Joana F Neves is a Senior Lecturer in Mucosal Immunology, group leader at King’s College London and 2023 Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine Prize winner.
Joana did her PhD in immunology at Queen Mary University of London before moving to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School to study immunological responses in colitis.
In 2014, Joana joined King’s College London where she held a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellowship and a RCUK/UKRI Rutherford Fund fellowship before establishing her research group and becoming a Lecturer.
Joana and her team developed complex intestinal organoid systems that incorporate immune, stroma and neuronal cells to study cell interactions in health and disease, which already lead to the discover of new roles for Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILC) in Inflammatory Bowel Disease.
Fiona Powrie
Kennedy
Institute, Oxford, United Kingdom
Long-lasting clonal memory of NK cells
Chiara Romagnani
DRFZ,
Berlin, Germany
Chiara Romagnani pursued her medical studies at the University of Florence, Italy, before specializing as an Oncologist at the National Cancer Institute in Genova. Following the completion of her PhD in Immunology at the University of Genova, under the guidance of Lorenzo Moretta, she was granted an EMBO fellowship to train as a postdoctoral researcher at the German Rheumatism Center (DRFZ) in Berlin, Germany. She established there her research focus in innate immunity and inflammation, first as a group leader and later as a DFG-Heisenberg Professor. She has contributed to the identification of signals responsible for the differentiation and activation of Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILCs) as well as to the discovery of human NK cell clonality and memory.
Presently, she holds the position of Berlin University Alliance Joint Full Professor at the Charité University and Free University Berlin and serves as the Chair of the Institute of Medical Immunology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Additionally, C. Romagnani holds the role of Chief Editor at the European Journal of Immunology and was recently awarded an ERC Advanced Grant.
Neuroimmune Circuits Controlling Allergic Immunity
Caroline Sokol
Massachusetts General Hospital, USA
Dr. Sokol is a principal investigator and practicing allergist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. Her laboratory studies the cutaneous neuro-immune interactions promoting allergic immune disease and underlying allergen induced itch responses. Most recently her laboratory established sensory neurons as crucial in linking allergen detection with dendritic cell activation and the initiation of the allergic immune response.
Innate Lymphoid Cell Regulation of Intestinal Tolerance and Physiology
Gregory Sonnenberg
Weill
Cornell Medicine, New York City, USA
The focus and long-term research goals of the Sonnenberg Laboratory are to interrogate the mechanisms that maintain a state of health in the human gastrointestinal tract. This is a considerable challenge given the enormous surface area of this organ in which a single layer of intestinal epithelial cells segregates an estimated 100 trillion commensal bacteria from a significant portion of our bodies total immune system. While interactions between mammalian hosts and commensal bacteria are normally beneficial, it is becoming increasingly clear the dysregulated interactions can result in chronic inflammation. Further, emerging studies in patient populations indicate that abnormal host immune responses to commensal bacteria are causally-linked to the pathogenesis and progression of numerous chronic infectious, inflammatory and metabolic diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and cancer. Ongoing research in the Sonnenberg Laboratory aims to (1) interrogate the pathways that regulate normally beneficial host interactions with commensal bacteria, (2) determine how these pathways become disrupted in chronic human diseases, and (3) identify novel therapeutic targets to prevent or limit dysregulated host-commensal bacteria relationships in human disease.
Human Immunity: One Cell At A Time
Sarah Teichmann
Sanger
Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Sarah Teichmann is interested in global principles of protein interactions and gene expression. In particular, her research now focuses on genomics and immunity. From 2016, Sarah is the Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started a group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001. In 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridge, where her group was joint between the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Sarah is an EMBO member and fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and her work has been recognized by a number of prizes, including the Lister Prize, Biochemical Society Colworth Medal, Royal Society Crick Lecture and EMBO Gold Medal.
Heterogenity and Harnessing of NK Cells
Eric Vivier
Centre of Immunology at Marseille-Luminy (CIML), France
Following a post-doctorate at Harvard Medical School, he moved to Aix-Marselle as a Professor of CIML in 1993 before becoming Director from 2008 to 2017.
He is one of the founders of the Marseille-Immunopôle, the centre of immunology created in 2014 to carry out fundamental research on therapy, innovation and industrial development in the Aix-Marseille metropolis. As co-founder and Scientific Director of the biotech company Innate Pharma; he also leads the “Innate Lymphoid Cell” laboratories at CIML and “Immunoprofiling” at the Hôpital de la Timone (AP-HM). He is also president of biocluster at the Paris Saclay Cancer Cluster.
Neuroimmune Ecosystems
Henrique Veiga-Fernandes
Champalimaud
Institute, Lisbon, Portugal
Henrique Veiga-Fernandes studied Veterinary Medicine at Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and at Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. In 2002, he obtained a PhD in Immunology from Université René Descartes, Paris, France, before moving to the National Institute for Medical Research, London, UK, as a postdoc. In 2009, he returned to Portugal to set up his independent research group at Instituto de Medicina Molecular, where he became member of the direction team in 2014. In 2016, Henrique Veiga-Fernandes joined the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Portugal, where he is currently a Senior Group Leader.
Henrique Veiga-Fernandes was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2015, and he was made Commander of the Order of Sant’Iago da Espada by Portugal in the same year. He secured several European Research Council (ERC) awards (2007, 2013, 2015 and 2017) and has previously won the Pfizer Prize for basic Science (2014 and 2016), the senior research award from the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, USA (2014), the Innovator and Breakthrough Awards from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, USA (2013 and 2014), the National Blood Foundation Scholar, USA (2012), and he integrated the EMBO Young Investigator Programme in 2008.
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