Postgraduate Seminar – Infection, Inflammation and Immunity Theme hosted by Sophia Davidson, Stephen Nutt, Dylan Sheerin

Professor Phil Hodgkin

Co-Division Head, Immunology division – Infection, Inflammation & Immunity Theme, WEHI

 

Overview of our Immune System: Everything you need to know in one hour

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via TEAMS

Including Q&A session

Understanding our immune system has never seemed more important as we face pandemics and race to develop new vaccines. Dissecting how the system works continues to be a fascinating research journey. In this seminar I will review the principles that underlie our understanding of immunity and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the field. As new postgrad recruits, I will ask you to think boldly and aim to revise our creaking old theories and transform our understanding with new approaches.

Phil Hodgkin is current joint head of the Immunology Division at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne. His discoveries in T cell and B cell biology have contributed to original theoretical ideas for the field. His lab’s experimental work focusses on the mechanics of how lymphocytes perceive and process multiple signals to regulate proliferation, survival and differentiation. The resulting theoretical solutions illustrate how we might simplify our understanding of cellular heterogeneity, the coding of complex behavior and the stepwise transformation of healthy responses to various malignancies. His overall goal is to translate experimental insights to the building of functional models that can inform and improve our predictions for how the immune system will behave, how it leads to disease and how drug therapies can be optimally targeted to individuals. He would like to see future research programs integrate interdisciplinary experimental/theoretical efforts to facilitate such advances and ensure our models scale and translate information from molecular to cellular to whole system level.  

All welcome!