CID Weekly Seminar Series - Tuesday 4 April: Professor Nicole La Gruta, "Determinants of Effective CD8+ T cell immunity"

Tuesday 4 April, 12:00 - 1:00pm, Seminar Room 1, TRF Building

Professor Nicole La Gruta

Viertel Senior Medical Research Fellow

Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Infection and Immunity Program

Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University

Nicole's research focuses on understanding the key drivers of effective CD8+ T cell immunity. In this presentation she will summarize her findings on how the abundance and quality of antigen-specific T cells in the preimmune repertoire impacts on immune response magnitudes, detailing how the mode of TCR recognition of antigen dictates T cell recruitment into the immune response. Moreover, she will describe recent work elucidating how ageing undermines primary CD8 T cell responses, in part, through direct effects on naïve CD8 T cells that alter their phenotype and decrease their functionality. To understand the molecular basis of these defects, Nicole's team have assessed functional, metabolic and transcriptional differences across various subsets of naive CD8 T cells from young and aged mice and humans. Understanding characteristics that drive or delimit effective T cell responses permits the optimization or recovery of T cell function via strategies that target these mechanisms.

Biography

Nicole La Gruta obtained her undergraduate degree at Monash University and also completed her PhD at Monash on the initiating events in T cell mediated organ-specific autoimmunity. After completing her PhD training she moved to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tn, for a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr Dario Vignali investigating the immediate downstream consequences of TCR ligation. She returned to Melbourne in 2002 to assist in the establishment of Prof Peter Doherty’s laboratory at the University of Melbourne, and initiated studies into the drivers of T cell response magnitude. In 2008, Prof La Gruta started her independent research laboratory at the University of Melbourne. In 2016 she relocated to the Infection and Immunity Program at the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University where she continues to study the key determinants and hallmarks of effective CD8+ T cell responses.

To book a meeting time with Nicole La Gruta - Meeting request form = https://goo.gl/forms/dheQ1rJhsPxq7H6w2

Further information

http://www.med.monash.edu.au/biochem/labs/lagruta-lab.html

A light lunch is served prior to the seminar at 11:45am in the seminar room foyer, level 2, TRF Building.

Further information, including the link to add the seminar series to your google calendar, is available from CID Weekly Seminar Series website [http://www.med.monash.edu.au/scs/medicine/cid/seminar-series.html