Katherine Fitzgerald, PhD, an international leader in the field of innate immunity, will give the Rolla E. Dyer Lecture at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, M.D., on Wednesday, April 25.
The presentation, also known as the NIH Director’s Award Lecture, is part of the Wednesday Afternoon Lecture (WAL) Series, a high-profile program that includes presentations from world renowned biomedical and behavioral scientists to a broad audience. Dr. Fitzgerald, the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research Chair, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology, and director of the Program in Innate Immunity, will focus on how the innate immune system detects pathogens through nucleic acid sensing pathways and how dysregulation of these innate pathways leads to human diseases.
Fitzgerald will discuss how the type I IFN response is tightly regulated and contributes to host defense. She will describe how her lab is using mouse models to study mutations in a molecule called STING and how that leads to a debilitating inflammatory disease called SAVI.
“My laboratory has made a number of very important and unique contributions to these areas. We have defined nucleic acids as microbial triggers during infection with viruses, bacteria and parasites, and identified new receptors for these nucleic acids and new regulation of the pathways induced,” Fitzgerald said. “This lecture will describe these discoveries by exploring how nucleic acid sensing pathways drive host-defense and the inflammatory process.”
While it will be her first time participating in the WAL series, Fitzgerald has spoken at the NIH several times, including appearances during an NIH Immunology Interest Group Retreat.
Fitzgerald’s presentation will be live-streamed on the NIH website on Wednesday, April 25, starting at 3 p.m.: https://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=27210&bhcp=1.
