Scientific Advisory Board
Prof. Hidde Ploegh, PhD
(Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA)
Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board
Prof. Ploegh has recently been appointed faculty member to the prestigious, M.I.T.-associated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA. Prior to this, Hidde Ploegh had been Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor of Immunopathology at Harvard Medical School, where he has been heading the school’s Immunology program since 1997.
His prior academic appointments included Professorships at M.I.T. (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 in 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 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 are delivered to the right destination, in order to properly activate immune responses. Prof. Ploegh has published more than 300 research papers, including the June 24, 2004 cover story for the journal Nature, which describes one of the mechanisms by which the immune system eliminates misfolded proteins.
Prof. Ploegh’s honors include Correspondent of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, National Institutes of Health Merit Award, Avery-Landsteiner Prize, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Prof. Frederick W. Alt, MD, PhD
(Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, Director of CBR Institute for Biomedical Research)
Frederick (Fred) W. Alt, a graduate from Stanford University, is the Scientific Director of the CBR (Center for Blood Research) Institute for Biomedical Research, a non-profit academic institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Furthermore, Fred Alt is Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Genetics at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Prof. Alt’s prior academic appointments included Professorships at Columbia University, NY (1982-1991), and post-doctoral research with David Baltimore at M.I.T. (1977-1982). Prof. Alt is a world-leading expert in the fields of immunology and cancer biology and he is renowned for his pioneering research into the vast 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 involved in generating the adaptive immune system and he also 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 role of additional factors in maintenance of genome stability and suppression of cancer.
His outstanding achievements have been published in more than 400 scientific publications.
His 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, Alt 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 also serves on many national and international advisory boards. In 2005 he has served as Chair of several boards including the Board of Scientific Councilors (basic) of the National Cancer Institute, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Irvington Institute for Biomedical Research, and the SAB of the IMP in Vienna, Austria.
Prof. Max D. Cooper, MD
(Emory Vaccine Center, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA)
Max Cooper, a graduate from Tulane University Medical School, is Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and 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 has practiced medicine and conducted research from 1967-2008. He has held a position as investigator at the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 1988. From 1963-1967 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 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 lymphopoiesis and contributed to ground-breaking research, which led to the discovery of isotype switching by IgM-producing B cells. During the 1970s 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 involved in clinical studies, particularly in relation to cell differentiation abnormalities in immunodeficiencies and lymphoid malignancies.
Prof. Cooper has published more than 400 scientific publications and is editor of various top-ranked immunological journals, like 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 (Societe Francaise d’Immunologie).
Prof. Antonius G. Rolink, PhD
(Professor and holder of the Roche-endowed Chair for Immunology at the University of Basel, Switzerland)
Antonius (Ton) Rolink is Head of the Department of Molecular and Developmental Immunology and holder of a Roche-endowed chair of Immunology at the Department of Clinical and Biological Sciences (DKBW), University of Basel, Switzerland. From 1983, he was 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 started 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-switching gene determining the commitment of lymphoid progenitor cells to B cell lineage differentiation. Furthermore, he has pioneered the development of tissue culture systems allowing the recapitulation of B cell development in vitro, starting from earliest B cell progenitors all the way to antibody producing plasma cells.
Prof. Rolink has published more than 150 scientific publications, including many in top-ranking journals. He has several appointments in editorial boards of leading scientific journals and he has been the organizer of many workshops of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) on lymphocyte development.