Richard Locksley, MD, is Sandler Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Director of the Sandler Asthma Basic Research (SABRE) Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Locksley received his degree in Biochemistry from Harvard College and his medical degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry. He did an internal medicine residency and Chief Medical Residency at the University of California, San Francisco. Following a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington in Seattle, Dr. Locksley became Assistant Professor and Head of Infectious Diseases at the Veterans Hospital at the University of Washington. In 1986, he was recruited back to UCSF as the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases from 1986-2004. He was appointed the Director of the SABRE Center in 2003, where he continues today. Dr. Locksley has been an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997. His research investigates the cells and cytokines of immunity, with a particular interest in allergic, or type 2, immunity. He was involved in the early studies of allergic T cells, termed Th2 cells, and in the discovery of innate lymphoid cells associated with allergic immunity, designated ILC2s. His student and postdoctoral trainees have populated academic medical centers in the United States and abroad.
Dr. Locksley is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists and an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Susan Kaech, Ph.D., 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 did her postdoctoral work with Dr. Rafi Ahmed at Emory University (1999–2004) and received her Ph.D. in Developmental Biology at Stanford University. She received her BS in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Washington.
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.
Dr. Kaech has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Damon Runyon–Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fellowship (1999), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences (2003), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2007) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist (2009).
Scott Hultgren, Ph.D., Helen Lehbrink Stoever Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Director of the Center for Women’s Infectious Disease Research at Washington University in St. Louis, received his Ph.D. at Northwestern University, and postdoctoral training with Staffan Normark at Umeå, Sweden. He was elected to the National Academies of Sciences (2011) and Medicine (2017); and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received Washington University Distinguished Investigator and 2nd Century Awards, the Eli Lilly Award, St. Louis Science Academy’s Fellows Award, a Nobel Fellowship, an NIH Merit grant, an honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Umeå University, a Shipley Lecturership at Harvard University and been named a College Luminary by Indiana University. He has also chaired a Gordon Conference on Microbial Attachment and co-chaired the national “Moving into the Future: New Dimensions and Strategies for Women’s Health Research” conference sponsored by ORWH/NIH and Washington University.