From Neanderthals to COVID-19: genetic and evolutionary sources of human immune response variation
 

Monday, October 10, 2022 at 17:00 in auditorium A (Lacroix)

Lecture given by Professor Lluis QUINTANA-MURCI

Collège de France & Institut Pasteur, Paris, France

The lecture will be followed by a reception at the de Duve Institute.

The DDUV Institute is pleased to invite you to the 23rd Heremans Lecture, which will be given by Professor Lluis QUINTANA-MURCI, who will enlighten us on the immune response variation:

"From Neanderthals to COVID-19: genetic and evolutionary sources of human immune response variation".

The lecture will take place on Monday, October 10 at 5:00 PM, in the auditorium A (Lacroix) on the UCL Health Sciences campus in Brussels. It will be followed by a reception at the de Duve Institute.

Professor Quintana-Murci, presently Professor at the Collège de France and Institut Pasteur, is a world-renowned population geneticist. He earned his PhD in Population Genetics at the University of Pavia (Italy), after obtaining a MSc in Biology at the University of Barcelona (Spain). He was a visiting scientist at the universities of Oxford (UK), Tucson (USA), and more recently at the Rockefeller University in New York. Since 2007 he heads the Unit of Human Evolutionary Genetics at the Pasteur Institute, of which he was Scientific Director in 2016-2017. His research focuses on understanding the demographic and adaptive past of human populations, with a strong focus on Africa and the Pacific. He is also interested in how pathogens have exerted selective pressures on the human genome. In this context, his research focuses on the study of the genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors driving variation in human immune responses, as this helps to lay the foundations of precision medicine related to immune-related disorders and infectious diseases such as COVID-19. He has co-authored over 250 publications on fundamental population genetics as well as evolutionary genetics of infection and systems immunology. He is a member of EMBO, the Academia Europaea, and the French Academy of Sciences.

More information is available on the registration page. For security reasons, registration before September 28 is mandatory.