Hidde Ploegh, PhD (Chairman)
Member, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Professor of Biology, MIT
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Prof Ploegh is a faculty member at the prestigious, MIT-associated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA.
Prior to this, he was the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor of Immunopathology at Harvard Medical School, where he headed the school’s Immunology program from 1997 to 2005.
His prior academic appointments included Professorships at MIT (1992-1997), and the Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, while researching at The Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam (1984-1992). During this time he was also Dean of Graduate Studies at The Netherlands Cancer Institute.
Prof Ploegh is one of the world’s leading researchers studying the various strategies that viruses employ to evade attack by the immune system, and the ways in which our immune system distinguishes self from non-self. Among his many achievements, in 2002 Prof Ploegh discovered a new mechanism by which dendritic cells sense the presence of antigens and instruct the immune response. Furthermore, he has helped to elucidate how molecules presenting protein fragments are assembled and delivered to the right destination, properly activating immune responses. Prof Ploegh has contributed to more than 300 research papers, including the June 24, 2004 cover story for the journal Nature, describing one of the mechanisms the immune system utilizes to eliminate misfolded proteins.
Prof Ploegh’s honors include Correspondent of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Institutes of Health Merit Award, the Avery-Landsteiner Prize, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Frederick W Alt, MD, PhD
Director, Immune Disease Institute, Harvard Medical School
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Prof Alt, a graduate of Stanford University, is the Director/President of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine and the Immune Disease Institute, a non-profit academic institution affiliated with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School.
Prof Alt is also Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston, and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Prof Alt’s prior academic appointments include Professorships at Columbia University, NY (1982-1991), and post-doctoral research with David Baltimore at MIT (1977-1982). He is a world expert in the fields of Immunology and Cancer Biology. He is renowned for his pioneering research into the intricacies of genetic repair systems, and how breakdowns in those processes can lead to cancer. Prof Alt elucidated many of the basic genetic principles that are employed by the adaptive immune system for generating genetic diversity, and he discovered the N-myc oncogene based on its common amplification in human neuroblastomas. Prof Alt’s research focuses on lymphocyte development, genomic instability, and cancer. Of particular note, his group played a key role in elucidating the non-homologous DNA end-joining pathway of DNA double strand break repair in mammalian cells, and in uncovering the functions of additional factors in maintenance of genome stability and suppression of cancer.
His outstanding achievements have been reported in more than 400 scientific publications.
Prof Alt’s honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1994), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and nomination as Foreign Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. In 2004, he received the prestigious Clowes Memorial Award from the American Association of Cancer Research and was named an Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar in Aging at the CBR Institute. In 2005, he received the Rabbi Shai Shacknai Prize from The Hebrew University, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society de Villiers International Achievement Award, the Irvington Institute Scientific Leadership Award in Immunology, and the Pasarow Foundation Award for extraordinary achievement in Cancer Research.
Prof Alt serves on numerous editorial boards and is Editor-in-Chief of Advances in Immunology. He has also served on many national and international advisory boards as Chair, including the Board of Scientific Counselors (Basic) of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the Irvington Institute for Biomedical Research, and the SAB of the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria.
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Max D Cooper, MD
Emory Vaccine Center, Emory University School of Medicine
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Prof Cooper, a graduate from Tulane University Medical School, is Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Emory Vaccine Center at the Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta.
Prior to this, he was Professor of Medicine, Pediatrics, Pathology and Microbiology at the Department of Medicine, and the Director of the Division of Developmental and Clinical Immunology at the Medical Center of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, where he practiced medicine and conducted research from 1967 to 2008. He held a position as an Investigator in the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) from 1988 to 2006. From 1963 to 1967, Max Cooper practiced medicine and was Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His early clinical training included appointments at various top-tier institutions, including Tulane Medical School, New Orleans; the Hospital for Sick Children, London; and the University of California at San Francisco.
Prof Cooper is a leading expert in the field of lymphoid and myeloid cell differentiation from hematopoietic precursors, with a particular interest in B cell lymphopoiesis. He contributed to groundbreaking research leading to the discovery of isotype switching by IgM-producing B cells. During the 1970’s, he worked with Martin Raff and John Owen in London and identified bone marrow and fetal liver precursors of B cells. His current research focuses on the life history of B and T cells, the role of immunoglobulin and non-immunoglobulin genes in B cell development, and the phylogeny of the adaptive immune system. Furthermore, Prof Cooper is actively involved in clinical studies, particularly in relation to cell differentiation abnormalities in immunodeficiencies and lymphoid malignancies.
Prof Cooper has contributed to more than 400 scientific publications and is editor of various top-ranked immunological journals, including Immunity, the Annual Review of Immunology, and International Immunology. He has been President of the Clinical Immunology Society and of the American Association of Immunologists, and his honors include, amongst others, the 3M Life Sciences Award, the Sandoz Prize for Immunology, the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award, and the American College of Physicians Award. Prof Cooper is a Life ‘Membre d’Honneur’ of the French Society of Immunology (Société Française d’Immunologie).
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Antonius G Rolink, PhD
Head of the Department of Molecular and Developmental Immunology, University of Basel
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Prof Rolink is Head of the Department of Molecular and Developmental Immunology and holds the Roche-endowed Chair of Immunology at the Department of Clinical and Biological Sciences (DKBW) at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
In 1983 he became a Principal Investigator at the world-renowned Basel Institute for Immunology, where he was appointed as a permanent member in 1995 until the closing of the Institute in 2001.
Prof Rolink began his academic career at the Central Laboratory of the Netherlands’ Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and is a leading expert in the fields of B lymphocyte biology and lymphocyte development. Among his many achievements is the discovery of the function of a master switch gene that determines the commitment of lymphoid progenitor cells to B cell lineage differentiation. Furthermore, he has pioneered the development of tissue culture systems allowing the replication of B cell development in vitro, starting from the first B cell progenitors and ending with antibody-producing plasma cells.
Prof Rolink has contributed to more than 150 scientific articles, including many in top-ranking journals. He has several appointments to editorial boards of leading scientific journals and he has been the organizer of many workshops of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) on lymphocyte development.
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