Symposiums and Conferences
Registration is now open for Innate Immunity Day 2024!
Friday, July 26, 2024
12:30 - 5:30 p.m.
New Education and Research Building, UMass Chan Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts
Register - deadline to register is July 15, 2024
Agenda
This year's event will feature talks from experts in the field of innate immunity in celebration of work the of Douglas Golenbock, MD, the Neil and Margery Blacklow Chair in Infectious Diseases and Immunology, professor of medicine, division chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology, and co-director of the Program in Innate Immunity.
Dr. Golenbock is a physician-scientist who has spent much of his career working on developing therapeutic interventions for important human diseases and he has made substantial contributions to the investigation of innate immune mechanisms in human cells. His research focuses on innate immunity in the context of bacterial and parasitic infections, as well as neurodegenerative diseases. His major interests are in the mechanisms of inflammation, such as the role of the innate immune response in gonococcal infections, nucleic acid recognition in both bacterial infections and malaria, epigenetics related to malaria infection, and NLRP3-related inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Golenbock has nearly 300 peer-reviewed publications, many in high-impact journals, and over 81,000 citations. He has received continuous funding from the NIH for over 30 years and has been a recipient of an NIH MERIT Award. Most recently, in the fall of 2023, Dr. Golenbock was honored with the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Scholarship at UMass Chan Medical School.
Learn more about the work of Dr. Golenbock.
2023
Innate Immunity Day 2023: Mechanisms and Consequences of Cell Death was held on May 10, 2023, and featured an exciting lineup of scientific talks from experts in the field of innate immunity as well as the student and postdoctoral awardees of RISE: The Robert W. Finberg, MD Memorial Research Training Awards.
2022
Innate Immunity Day 2022: A celebration in honor of Dr. Robert Finberg, was held on May 25, 2022. The day was a celebration in memory of Dr. Finberg and his distinguished career, and featured keynotes and talks from his former colleagues, collaborators, and friends.
Speakers from previous years have included:
- Luke O’Neill, PhD
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland - Jules Hoffmann, PhD (Nobel Laureate)
Molecular and Cellular Biology Institute, Strasbourg, France - Gary Ruvkun, PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
- Akiko Iwasaki, PhD
Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT - Andrew Luster, MD, PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA - Kensuke Miyake, PhD
University of Tokyo, Japan
- Jonathan Kagan, PhD
Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA - Daniel Stetson, PhD
University of Washington, Seattle, WA - Virginia Pascual, MD
Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Health, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY - Beth Stevens, PhD
Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA - Marco Colonna, MD
Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO - Frederic Geissmann, MD, PhD
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
International Toll Conferences
The International Toll Conferences aim to present recent advances on Toll and Toll-like receptors and related molecules in innate immunity. These meetings are held approximately every 2-3 years and are a unique opportunity for communication and networking between world-class faculty, ranging from developmental biologists to translational scientists, and new and established researchers in the field. Past conferences have been held in Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands.
The most recent conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands was held in April 2024 and featured some of the best of the field of innate immunity including Drew Weissman (Keynote speaker), Luke O’Neill, Andrea Ablasser, Lali Ramakrishnan, Feng Shao, Cateano Reis e Sousa, Judy Leiberman, Michael Heneka, Kate Fitzgerald, Michaela Gack Mihai Netea, Ramnik Xavier, Richard Flavell, Egil Lien, Russel Vance, Jon Kagan, Vishva Dixit, Shannon Turley, Philipp Henneke, Yasmine Belkaid, Martin Guilliams, Eicke Latz, Kenneth Rock, Bruno Lemaitre, Clare Bryant and many others.