Alan A. Aderem

Dr. Aderem received a Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and joined the faculty of the Rockefeller University, New York, in 1982. In 1991 he was appointed head of the Laboratory of Signal Transduction at the Rockefeller University. He joined the Department of Immunology at the University of Washington in 1996, and the Institute for Systems Biology in 2000 where he currently serves as director. Current research interests: Our focus is on the innate immune system; how it recognizes and formulates responses to infectious agents, and how it instructs the adaptive immune system to provide long-lived immunity to the pathogen. Our initial studies defined how pattern recognition receptors, in particular the Toll-like receptors, identify bacteria: in essence, how the immune cell reads the molecular bar-code of the microbe and thereby precisely defines the nature of the threat. This precise recognition triggers a specific, highly regulated, response to the pathogen by the host. Our current focus is the molecular definition of these responses. To do so we are using the tools of systems biology to develop predictive models of the immune and inflammatory responses. We are also using nanotechnology to build devices with sufficient sensitivity to allow multi-parameter analysis of single cells. The long-term goals are predictive and preventive medicine.