Research Highlights advisory panel
Research Highlights advisory panel
Papers and web sites in the Research Highlights section of Nature Reviews Immunology are chosen with the aid of the following Research Highlights advisors:
- Cezmi Akdis
- Bruce Beutler
- Peter Cresswell
- James Di Santo
- Gary Koretzky
- Charles MacKay
- Cornelis Melief
- Michel Nussenzweig
- Richard M. Ransohoff
- Alan Sher
- Andreas Strasser
- Megan Sykes
- Eric Vivier
- Matthias von Herrath
Cezmi Akdis
Cezmi A. Akdis, M.D. is an Associate Professor of Immunology and Head of the Immunology Department at the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research (SIAF), as well as being the Secretary of the Immunology Board of European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI). His research interests include: regulation of allergic inflammation by T cells and cytokines; mechanisms of peripheral T-cell tolerance in the normal immune response to environmental allergens/antigens in healthy individuals, as well as allergen-specific immunotherapy; and mechanisms of cure in allergy and asthma, and the development of better vaccines for the curative treatment of allergy.
Bruce Beutler
Bruce Beutler is a Professor in the Department of Immunology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, USA. For many years he has worked on identifying essential components of the mamalian innate immune response. In 1998, using positional cloning methods, Beutler and colleagues cloned the endotoxin-response gene, Lps (Tlr4). This important discovery revealed the essential function of the mamalian Toll-like receptors, and led to our present understanding of how innate immune cells sense pathogens. Beutler and his group are now using forward genetic methods to identify other genes required for pathogen resistance.
Peter Cresswell
Peter Cresswell was born in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, UK. He is a graduate of the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (B.Sc. in chemistry, M.Sc. in microbiology), and he obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry and immunology from London University. He carried out post-doctoral training at Harvard University with Dr Jack L. Strominger. Before assuming his position at Yale as Professor of Immunobiology, Dr Cresswell was Chief of the Division of Immunology at Duke University Medical Center. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK, in 2000, and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.
James Di Santo
James Di Santo received a combined M.D./Ph.D. in 1989/1991 from Cornell University Medical College and the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. He completed post-doctoral training with Alain Fischer in Paris, where he characterized several genes responsible for primary human immunodeficiency syndromes. In 1994, he became a staff scientist at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM). He subsequently generated a mouse line deficient in the common cytokine receptor g chain as a model for human X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency. Since 1999, he directs a laboratory in the Immunology Department of the Pasteur Institute, where his research interests include the role of cytokines in lymphoid development, natural killer cell differentiation and animal models of immunodeficiency.
Gary Koretzky
Gary Koretzky received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, followed by training in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology at the University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA. As a graduate student and postdoc, he was interested in the molecular events important for T-cell activation. This interest led to studies examining the role of phosphatases (in particular, CD45) as regulators of T-cell-antigen-receptor signalling. More recently, his laboratory has been investigating the role of adaptor proteins as regulators of activation of T cells as well as other cells of haematopoeitic lineage.
Charles MacKay
Charles Mackay did his Ph.D at Melbourne University and spent 7 years at the Basel Institute for Immunology, where he studied lymphocyte migration. He then moved to industry as Director of Immunology, first at LeukoSite Inc., and then at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. In 1999 he returned to Australia to head the Inflammation Department at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Sydney. His interests include chemokines, cell migration, immunological memory and effector T cells, and inflammation (particularly arthritis and asthma).
Cornelis Melief
Cornelis (Kees) Melief is currently Head of the Department of Immunohaematology and Bloodbank of the University Hospital in Leiden, and Professor of Internal Medicine. Trained as a medical doctor, he completed a Ph.D. on leukocyte antibodies and immune adherence with Prof. J. J. van Loghem in 1967. His early research focused on T-cell recognition of transplantation antigens. In the past 20 years, he has worked extensively to develop clinically applicable T-cell-based immunotherapy for cancer. He is a member of the scientific advisory committees of several European Institutes, including the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the Danish Cancer Institute and the Edward Jenner Vaccine Research Institute.
Michel Nussenzweig
Dr Nussenzweig is Sherman Fairchild Professor and Senior Physician at the Rockefeller University, New York. He obtained his Ph.D. for work on dendritic cells with Ralph Steinman at Rockefeller University. He earned an M.D. degree from New York University Medical School. Dr Nussenzweig trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. His postdoctoral research was carried out with Philip Leder at Harvard Medical School on immunoglobulin genes and B-cell development. Dr Nussenzweig currently works on B cells and dendritic cells.
Richard M. Ransohoff
Richard M. Ransohoff is the director of the Neuroinflammation Research Center at the Cleveland Clinic. He has long been interested in the mechanisms by which cytokine-driven neuroinflammation contributes to human neurological disorders, such as MS, neurological complications to HIV infections and Alzheimer disease. In 1993, his group discovered that chemokines were produced by resident astroglial cells of the central nervous system (CNS) during a model neuroinflammatory disease and, since then, his laboratory has focused mainly on the functions of chemokines and their receptors in the physiology and pathology of the nervous system.
Alan Sher
Alan Sher is currently Head of the Immmunobiology Section, Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, USA. His research group focuses on the regulation of host immune responses to parasitic and bacterial pathogens, and, in particular, the role of TH1/TH2 effector choice in determining the outcome of infection. A current emphasis is the study of the role played by dendritic cells (DCs) in the initiation of anti-microbial immune responses and the regulation of DC function during infection.
Andreas Strasser
Andreas Strasser received his Ph.D. under supervision of Professor Fritz Melchers at the Basel Institute for Immunology, where he investigated B-cell development. In 1989, he came to The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, to do a postdoc with Suzanne Cory, studying the role of Bcl-2 in lymphocyte survival and neoplastic transformation. Since 1995, he has become a faculty member at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Current research interests are focussed on the control of cell death, in particular the function of the Bcl-2 protein family and the family of Fas/tumour-necrosis-factor receptor 1-related death receptors. Technical approaches used include: cloning of novel cell-death regulators by screening l phage expression and yeast two-hybrid libraries, and studying the function of cell-death proteins by generating transgenic and gene knockout mice.
Megan Sykes
Megan Sykes, M.D., works as an immunologist in the Departments of Surgery and Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and she is Professor of Surgery and Medicine (Immunology) at Harvard Medical School. Dr Sykes is a transplantation immunologist whose research interests include the separation of graft-versus-tumour effects from graft-versus-host disease in haematopoietic-cell transplantation (HCT), the induction of transplantation tolerance using HCT, and the induction of xenograft tolerance. She is a Councilor of the International Transplantation Society and of the International Xenotransplantation Association, and she serves on the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Xenotransplantation. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Immunology, Transplantation, Xenotransplantation, the American Journal of Transplantation and several other journals.
Eric Vivier
Eric Vivier is Professor of Immunology at the Université de la Méditerranée (Marseille-Luminy) and is Group Leader at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy. He is trained in veterinary medicine and obtained a Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Paris in 1991. His research accomplishments include identification of protein tyrosine kinase-dependent pathways in natural killer (NK) cell signalling, identification and mode of action of immunoreceptor tyrosine-based inhibitory motifs (ITIMs) in inhibitory major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I receptors (KIR and Ly49), and identification and function of KARAP/DAP12. Current lab interests focus on the in vivo function of NK cells, the role of TM1 cells (KIR+/LIR-1+ memory-phenotype CD8+ T cells in humans, Ly49+ memory-phenotype CD8+ T cells in mice), and the manipulation of NK cells for therapeutic applications.
Matthias von Herrath
Matthias von Herrath obtained his M.D. in Freiburg, Germany, and he practiced medicine until 1991, when he joined Michael Oldstone for a post-doctoral fellowship. He has directed an independent laboratory since 1996, and he is currently tenured Associate Professor at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in San Diego, California. His group is interested in devising new strategies to prevent type 1 diabetes by inducing autoreactive regulatory T cells. Their modes of action through the modulation of antigen-presenting cells and their combinatorial use with other immune interventions (such as CD3- and CD40L-specific antibodies) are of particular interest. Furthermore, positive as well as negative associations between viral infections and autoimmune diseases are being investigated.
