Guest Speakers

Opening Keynote Speaker:

"Gene Regulation Roots of Fetal and Postnatal T Cell Development"

Ellen V. Rothenberg, Ph.D., the Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology at Caltech, studies molecular mechanisms underlying lymphocyte development.  She graduated from Harvard University and received her Ph.D. from MIT.  After a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, she took a faculty position at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, then joined the Caltech faculty in 1982.  She has served on external advisory boards for academic research institutes in multiple countries, chaired the scientific advisory boards for the Max-Planck Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics and the Institute for Systems Biology, has taught in international advanced courses in immunology, developmental biology and systems biology, and has co-organized multiple immunology conferences in the US, UK, and Greece.  She has been awarded the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching (Caltech) and selected as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists (inaugural class), and she has been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences (USA). Her group studies gene regulation and development of T lymphocytes, gene networks controlling hematopoietic cell fates, and mechanisms underlying the dynamics of single-cell developmental decisions. 

Founder's Talk:

"Exploring Human ILCs and T Cells: From the Thymus to Peripheral Immunity"

Dr. Spits is an emeritus professor of Cell Biology at Amsterdam University Medical Centers (Amsterdam UMC), location AMC. He is a founder and, until 2019, served as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of AIMM Therapeutics. Previously, he was a Senior Director at Genentech, where he led drug discovery efforts in cancer immunotherapy and headed the autoimmune disease program. Before joining Genentech, Spits held the position of professor of Cell Biology at the AMC (now Amsterdam UMC). Earlier in his career, he was a senior staff scientist and Head of the Immunology Department at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. From 1985 to 1992, he worked at Schering-Plough, first at the Schering-Plough Institute for Immunological Research in Lyon, France, and later at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. Spits earned his PhD from the University of Amsterdam and conducted postdoctoral research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University. Throughout his career, Spits has made contributions to the understanding of development and function of human lymphocyte including T, B, NK cells and Innate Lymphoid cells. He did research on regulation of T cell development in the human thymus. Recent contributions include the discovery of human Lymphoid Tissue Inducer cells and other subsets of human Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILCs). Furthermore, Spits’s lab developed a technology to immortalize human antibody-producing B cells, that enabled his AIMM team to create the highly neutralizing anti-RSV antibody D25, which is the precursor to nirsevimab, now marketed as Beyfortus for the prevention of RSV infections in infants.