Category: Uncategorized
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How Lifestyle and Microbes Shape Immunity: Lessons from Mongolia
By Deeksha Raju INTRODUCTION Your immune system isn’t just built from DNA – it’s shaped by where you live, what you eat, and even the animals you live alongside. While the core mechanisms of immunity are shared across human populations, selective pressures on immune function can vary dramatically across different ecological and cultural contexts. Earlier…
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Immune system in a dish – One dish at a time
By Johanna Lueckel. What if we could grow a lymph node it in the lab, and watch T and B cells go about their business? No mice, no scalpel, no drama? That’s exactly the promise of so called immune organoids. In vitro grown and matured tissues designed to mimic the structure and function of lymphoid…
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A Day in the Life of an Immunology PhD Student: Living on Caffeine and Cytokines
By Deeksha Raju, PhD. Ever wondered what a day in the life of an Immunology PhD student looks like? Here is a brief idea! 07:30 – The Naïve Optimism Stage You wake up thinking, “Today’s the day! I’m going to finish that experiment, analyse the data, read the ten papers I’ve bookmarked, prepare that presentation…
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Day of Immunology – Prof. Claudia Mauri
Claudia Mauri is a Professor of Immunology at the Division of Infection and Immunity, Institute of Immunity and Transplantation at UCL. She earned her PhD in Microbiology from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1990. Her primary research centers on identifying, analyzing, and genetically characterizing regulatory B cells. She is also deeply interested in…
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Beyond Earth: How Space Travel Affects the Immune System
By Abhijeet Kulkarni. More likely than not, most of us have dreamt of being an astronaut exploring moons, planets, and galaxies in fancy spaceships as children. We have looked up to sky at night and wondered if a twinkling star is a visiting spaceship. It is possible, right? Exploring space and space flight is not…
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Music and the Immune System
By Abhijeet Kulkarni. In today’s world, listening to music has become a daily activity. Some of us listen while we work, commute, workout or when we’re on a break. More often than not, we have music playing on our headphones helping us focus on our work or bring some fun into a chore. It is…
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Women in Science – Prof. Nicole Joller
Nicole Joller is a Professor of Immunology at the University of Zurich and her research group focuses on understanding immune system regulation in host-pathogen interactions and studying the influence of infection history on disease susceptibility. After completing her PhD at ETH Zurich and post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School, she founded her research group at…
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Women in Science – Prof. Mübeccel Akdis
Prof. Mübeccel Akdis is the head of the Immune Regulation research group at the Swiss Institute for Allergy and Asthma research (SIAF) in Davos, Switzerland. Her research focuses on understanding and finding treatments for allergic diseases. More recently, her group has established techniques to investigate allergen-specific effector and regulatory immune cells in allergy and tolerance.…
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Women in Science – Prof. Emma Slack
Photo Credit: Emma Slack Emma Slack is a Full Professor of Mucosal Immunology at the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Health (D-HEST) ETH Zurich. Her research (ETH Zurich – Mucosal Immunology) focuses on understanding the interactions between the immune system, diet, and intestinal microbiota. Originally from the United Kingdom, she studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge…
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Science Communication in Academia – what’s expected outside of writing papers?
By Sinduya Krishnarajah, Postdoctoral Scientist, Becher lab. Illustration by Anne-Gaëlle Goubet for SYIS. Almost 5 years ago to the day, I landed in Zurich for a week of interviews with fellow Life Scientists hunting for PhD positions. I checked onto the return flight with a wide grin that I couldn’t wipe off my face for…
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