Dr. Melero started out in biomedical research as a resident of immunology at the prestigious department of this specialty in Hospital Universitario de la Princesa (Madrid). He completed his doctoral thesis with Professor Miguel López-Botet identifying and functionally studying natural killer cell receptors. His work obtained the Outstanding Doctorate Award. In 1994 he joined Bristol Myers Squibb
Company as a researcher in cancer immunotherapy in his institute in Seattle (WA). The result of his three years of work in this environment are pioneering publications in the knowledge of costimulation of antitumor immune responses and the use of immunostimulatory monoclonal antibodies. During this period, he worked with Professor Lieping Chen in the division led by Professor Karl E. Hellström. In 1998 he returned to Spain in the field of CIMA and Clínica Universidad de Navarra. In these centers he has led a multidisciplinary team working in cancer immunotherapy with cell therapy techniques, gene therapy and monoclonal antibodies. Dr. Melero is full professor of immunology at the University of Navarra, has directed 12 PhD thesis (6 of them obtained the Outstanding Doctorate Award), and has been principal researcher in over 30 clinical trials of immunotherapy (both sponsored by industry and by the center itself). His work has resulted in three patents transferred to industry. From a bibliometric point of view, Dr. Melero has an h-index of 54 and 223 articles indexed in Medline. For his career he has been awarded the BIAL Medicine award (2004), Conde de Cartagena Award of the Royal Academy of Medicine (2006) and Dr. Durantez award of the LAIR Foundation (2011), among other honors. In 2015 he was appointed director of the Immunology and Immunotherapy department of the Clínica Universidad de Navarra and in 2018 he was appointed Corresponding member of the Royal Nacional Academy of Medicine. The phrase that best defines Dr. Melero´s scientific biography is Translational Research in Cancer Immunotherapy in collaboration with pharmaceutical industry and with European groups receiving funding in consortia for the development of therapeutic strategies.

After graduating in Biology (National Prize), David Sancho specialized in Immunology as a resident at Hospital La Princesa (Madrid). While there, he led projects analyzing kinase polarization during the formation of the immune synapse and the immunoregulatory role of the C-type lectin CD69 in animal models of inflammation and autoimmunity. After obtaining his PhD from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Molecular Biology department), he took a postdoctoral position at the London Research Institute (Cancer Research UK), where he found a new C-type lectin (DNGR-1/CLEC9A) that selectively marks the population of human and mouse dendritic cells that cross-present antigens in MHC-I. His work established the function of DNGR-1/CLEC9A in cross-priming in vivo. On his return to Spain, he established his laboratory at the CNIC, where he has continued to analyze the basis of innate sensing by dendritic cells, the role of different dendritic cell subsets in pathophysiological models, and possible applications in new immunotherapy strategies. He secured a European Research Council Starting Grant (2010) and participates as a partner in a Horizon2020 consortium (2015), obtaining renewed funding from the ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016.

URSULA GROHMANN, Pharm.D. (Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology) and Ph.D. in Experimental Medicine, has been working at the Pharmacology Section of the Department of Experimental Medicine (DEM; University of Perugia, Italy) since 1986, first as post-doc fellow, then as senior researcher and associate professor. Since 2006, she has been appointed as full professor of Pharmacology at DEM, University of Perugia, and, since July 2014, as Visiting Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, NY (http://www.einstein.yu.edu/faculty/14465/ursula-grohmann/). In 1987-88 and 1990, she accomplished part of her research project at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD under the supervision of Drs. Michael Mage and Ettore Appella. In 2001, with other members of the DEM Pharmacology group, she discovered a crucial immunosuppressive role in tumor immunity for the enzyme indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) expressed by dendritic cells. Since then, she continued to study many aspects of IDO1’s biology not only in experimental tumor systems, but also in autoimmune and metabolic diseases, allergy, and chronic inflammation. In 2011, she discovered that IDO1 is not just an enzyme catabolizing tryptophan but also a signaling molecule capable of reprogramming dendritic cells towards an immunoregulatory profile. Grohmann’s group currently constitutes one of the top world leaders in research related to IDO1 and immune regulation. She is author of more than 130 published articles in extenso appearing in the NCBI database and inventor of two patents. The H index of her global career is equal to 52 (Google Scholar), with more than 13,400 citations , and her name is included in the list of Top Italian Scientists in the world. She has been and is the principal investigator of several national and international projects, including the ongoing Dynamics of IDO, awarded by the European Research Council (ERC; years 2014-2019). She has been recently awarded as Top Italian Woman Scientist 2016 (http://www.ondaosservatorio.it/cerimonia-top-italian-women-scientists-2016/) and has recently joined the Academy of Sciences of Umbria. She is a member of several scientific societies, including the international European Macrophage & Dendritic Cell Society and American Association of Immunologists, and is an active reviewer of national and international grants as well as oustanding journals, including Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, Immunity, Science Signaling, Journal of Clinical Investigation, EMBO Journal, among many others. She is the president of the Bioethical Committee of the University of Perugia, the Official Research Delegate of DEM, and the Director of the University Centre of Electronic Microscopy.

Marc Veldhoen has a masters in Medical Biology from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Utrecht and a PhD in Immunology obtained at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), London. He did his post-doc at NIMR, working on Thelper cell differentiation. In 2010 he moved to Cambridge to start his own group, with a focus on mucosal T cells. In 2016 he took up the position of ERA Chair at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Lisbon, with a continuing focus on mucosal T cell biology.

Professor Rick Maizels is at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology in the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation. He is an immunologist interested in fundamental questions of how parasites suppress the mammalian immune system, primarily for their own survival but in so doing, also dampen allergies and other inflammatory disorders. His work aims to discover novel immunomodulators from parasites that may be useful in suppressing inflammation and disease, and to develop new vaccine strategies that can lead to clearance of these very prevalent parasites. His laboratory is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and the Lung Foundation Netherlands. Rick moved to the University of Glasgow in 2016; between 1995 and 2015 he held the Chair of Zoology at the University of Edinburgh, and was previously Professor of Parasite Immunology at Imperial College London, where he moved in 1983. Prior to this, he held positions at the National Institute for Medical Research in London (1973-1976 and 1979-1983), as well as UCLA (1977-1979) and California Institute of Technology (1986-1977). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2002, a Senior Fellow of the American Asthma Foundation in 2010, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2018.

email : rick.maizels@glasgow.ac.uk

website : maizelslab.org

Maria M. Mota received her PhD degree in Molecular Parasitology from University College London in 1998, under the guidance of Anthony A Holder. She then moved to New York to pursue a postdoc at the New York University Medical Center and later in 2002 she started her own group at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), in Portugal. Currently, Maria is the Executive Director of Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes (iMM JLA) in Lisbon, and the leader of the research group Biology and Physiology of Malaria. Causative agent of malaria, interacts with its mammalian host. Some of the main questions her lab aims to understand are: What are the host mechanisms for sensing Plasmodium liver-stage infection? Does Plasmodium have evasion strategies to subvert host responses? How does Plasmodium fulfill its nutritional requirements to generate thousands of new parasites? Does Plasmodium sense and respond to the host nutritional status?
Maria has received several awards and honors throughout her career such as the European Science Foundation Young Investigator (EURYI) award in 2004, Prémio Pessoa in 2013, EMBO member in 2016, Pfizer award in 2017 and Sanofi – Institut Pasteur 2018 Award in the Mid-Career category.

Dinis joined Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute in 2013 after Postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, USA, which was preceded by PhD Training at the Gulbenkian Institute for Science, Portugal. More recently in 2015 Dinis’ laboratory of Immunity and Cancer became part of The Francis Crick Institute, a consortium of six UK scientific and academic organizations – Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Wellcome Trust, University College of London, Imperial College, and King’s College London. Dinis’ laboratory uses and integrative approach on immune cell development and cancer, with focus on the biology of the germinal center B cell reaction, including response to infection, vaccination and pathogenesis of lymphoma from these cells. Research contributions include: the identification of MYC positive B cell subsets essential for germinal center formation, maintenance and as possible Lymphoma precursors; defining BLIMP1 as a tumor suppressor, and of a synergistic mechanism between BLIMP1 loss and NF-kB activation in Lymphoma pathogenesis; uncovering the role of the PI3K pathway as the key survival signal downstream of the B cell receptor “tonic” signaling; development of bona-fide, clinically relevant mouse models of Lymphoma; and demonstration of functional roles for microRNAs in vivo.

Andreas Diefenbach is Professor and Chair of Microbiology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Senior Group Leader at the German Rheumatism Research Center. His lab studies transcriptional and epigenetic control of cell fate decisions in the innate immune system. Current research interests include how the immune system coordinates adaptation of multicellular organisms to constantly changing environments (microbiota, nutrients).
Andreas studied Medicine at the University of Erlangen and graduated in Microbiology and Immunology (1998). He obtained postdoctoral training at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California Berkeley (1999-2002). Prior to joining Charité, he was an Assistant Professor at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University (2003-2006), a Full Professor at the University of Freiburg (2006-2013) and Professor and Chair of Medical Microbiology and the coordinator of the Research Centre of Immunology at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz (2013-2016). As a Physician Scientist, Andreas has been supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the European Research Council, and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). He is the coordinator of the DFG Priority Program 1937 (“Innate Lymphoid Cells”). He was awarded with the Main Scientific Prize of the German Society of Hygiene and Microbiology and was a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences USA & Alexander- von-Humboldt-Stiftung. Since 2017, he is recognized as one of the Highly Cited Researchers (Clarivate Analytics) selected on the basis of “consistent production” of highly cited papers in the last 11 years (defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year).

João Bettencourt Relvas, PhD, conducted his doctoral studies in molecular genetics at the university of London and Lisbon (1992-1997), and post-doctoral work at the university of Cambridge, UK (1997-2002). He was an independent junior group research leader at the Institute for Cell Biology of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, CH (2002- 2008), and later joined the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IBMC), which is now part of the Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde (i3S) (http://www.i3s.up.pt), in Porto, Portugal. There, he heads the glial cell biology lab and is also the coordinator of the Integrative program in Neurobiology and Neurological Disorders, and the Porto campus coordinator of the newly established Discoveries Centre for Regenerative and Precision Medicine (https://thediscoveriesctr.eu) partially funded by a large Teaming Horizon 2020 project grant. His lab aims at better understanding the molecular mechanisms governing glial homeostasis, particularly myelinating glia and microglia. Using conditional transgenic approaches in mice, together with AAV and lentiviral-mediated gene delivery in vivo, proteomics, next generation sequencing, laser confocal microscopy, FRET, and appropriate cell culture systems, his labis currently focusing in how integrin and RhoGTPase signalling pathways regulate different aspects of myelinating and microglia biology.

Marta Jordão has a bachelor in Genetics and Biotechnology from the UTAD (Vila Real, Portugal) and a master in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the CNC (Coimbra, Portugal). Marta joined the University Medical Center of Freiburg in 2014 for her PhD in the field of Neuroimmunology. In the lab of Prof. Marco Prinz she has been exploring the myeloid complexity of the brain under both health and disease conditions.