Federica Sallusto

Federica Sallusto is an expert in the field of human cellular immunology. Her research has focused on dendritic cell and T cell traffic, mechanisms of T cell differentiation and immunological memory. Her studies in the human system revealed a differential expression of chemokine receptors in Th1, Th2 and Th17 cells and led to the characterization of “central memory” and “effector memory” T cells as memory subsets with distinct migratory capacity and effector function. Among her recent contributions are the discovery of Th22 cells as a distinct subset of skin-homing T cells and the characterization of non-classic Th1 cells induced by bacteria and of two distinct types of pathogen-specific Th17 cells with pro-inflammatory and regulatory properties.

Her studies in the mouse model challenged current dogmas as to the mechanisms that control lymphocyte migration in lymph nodes and in the central nervous system. She also developed a method for the analysis of human naïve and memory T cell repertoires based on high throughput cellular screenings of expanded T cell libraries that provides a comprehensive platform for an analytic approach to vaccine design. For her scientific achievements, she received the Pharmacia Allergy Research Foundation Award in 1999, the Behring Lecture Prize in 2009, and the Science Award from the Foundation for Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases in 2010. She was elected member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina in 2009 and of EMBO in 2011.

Federica Sallusto is currently Group leader of the Cellular Immunology Laboratory at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona and Director of the Center of Medical Immunology at the same institute. She holds a joint professorship at the ETH Zurich and at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano.