Keynote Archive
Dr. Dawn Bowdish who is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Aging & Immunity and the Executive Director of the Firestone Institute of Respiratory Health. She started her laboratory at McMaster in 2009. Her team of post-doctoral fellows, undergraduate and graduate students study how macrophages recognize and destroy Streptococcus pneumoniae, the major cause of pneumonia in the elderly. Using a combination of animal models and human samples her lab has is uncovering how ageing, and age-associated inflammation affects the development of myeloid cells, which ultimately impairs monocyte and macrophage function and how the microbiota of the upper respiratory tract becomes permissive to Streptococcus pneumoniae colonization with age. She has published over 100 manuscripts, review articles and book chapters. She has won a number of early career awards including the Pfizer-ASPIRE award and the G. Jeannette Thorbecke Award from the Society of Leukocyte Biology. She has received recognition for her teaching and mentorship in the form of the Department of Pathology’s “Best Teacher Award” and by a nomination from her trainees for the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision. She has received funding from the CIHR, NSERC, ORF, NIH, the Labarge Optimal Aging Initiative and the Lung Association to understand why the elderly are susceptible to pneumonia and to develop novel preventative therapies. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Lung Health Foundation and advocates to increase research funding for lung health.
Dr. Susan Kaech is a Salk Institute Professor, Director of the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, and holder of the NOMIS Chair. Prior to this, she was a Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor at Yale University in the Department of Immunobiology (2004–2018). Dr. Kaech aims to understand how memory T cells are produced during infection and vaccination, how they function, and why in some particular cases, they fail to induce long-term immunity. Her lab has been a leader in using genetic and molecular tools to identify the genes and signaling molecules involved in generating two specific types of memory T cells, CD4 and CD8, from precursor cells during both acute and chronic viral infections. She and her team discovered more than half a dozen important regulatory genes, as well as several types of key molecules called cytokines, which influence memory T cell development. Dr. Kaech is also interested in how T cells are metabolically regulated, and how their differentiation and function can be altered by nutrient availability during infection and in tumors. In particular, she seeks to learn how T cell behavior is suppressed by tumors, in order to create better therapies for cancer using the body's own immune system—an innovative and rapidly moving field called cancer immunotherapy.
We are pleased to announce the keynote speaker for this year will be Dr. David Schatz, a professor of Immunobiology at Yale University. Dr. Schatz has published over 160 co-authored articles and is the recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship among many others. Dr. Schatz is the discoverer of RAG1 and RAG2, as well as the two levels of somatic hypermutation regulation. His research interests are the mechanisms underlying V(D)J recombination, somatic hypermutation, and how these natural processes can contribute to lymphomas and leukemias.
Dr. Ostrand Rosenberg is a Professor of Biology and the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair at the University of Maryland. She has been a member of the American Association of Cancer Research and the American Association of Immunologists. Dr. Suzanne Ostrand Rosenberg has more than 40 years of experience studying cancer immunology with the goal of manipulating the immune system to reject cancer cells. During this time she has made several pivotal discoveries in the field. Early on she was one of the first researchers to demonstrate that CD4+ T cells are essential for immune mediated tumor rejection. Her lab was also among the first to discover that myeloid derived suppressor cells are found in all cancer patients and present an obstacle to cancer immunotherapies. Dr. Ostrand-Rosenberg is currently working on deactivating the suppressive activity of these myeloid cell populations creating a more favorable environment for immunotherapy in cancer patients.
Dr. Ann C. Palmenberg is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In recognition of her expertise, Dr. Palmenberg was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2009. This is the honorary society of the American Society for Microbiology and whose Fellows include Harry Eagle and Jonas Salk. Dr. Palmenberg is one of North America’s leading picornavirus researchers having published notable papers on encephalomyocarditis virus and human rhinovirus (AKA the cause of the common cold) in esteemed journals including Science, Nature and Cell (see selected publications below). Her current research focuses on host-cell interactions between rhinovirus and the infected cell. We are pleased to have Dr. Palmenberg speak at the 12th annual IIRF about her research and experiences in science.
