Nickname | AAI |
---|---|
Formation | 1913 |
Headquarters | Rockville, Maryland |
Fields | Immunology |
Membership (2023) | 7,700 |
President | Stephen Jameson |
Main organ | The Journal of Immunology |
Website | www |
The American Association of Immunologists (AAI) is an international scientific society dedicated to furthering the study of immunology. AAI provides its members with a variety of platforms in which to exchange ideas and present the latest immunological research, including the AAI annual meeting and The Journal of Immunology . In 2017, AAI launched an open-access journal, ImmunoHorizons. AAI is a founding member society of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). [1]
The American Association of Immunologists is an association of professionally trained scientists from all over the world dedicated to advancing the knowledge of immunology and its related disciplines, fostering the interchange of ideas and information among investigators, and addressing the potential integration of immunologic principles into clinical practice. [2] AAI serves its members by providing a center for the dissemination of information relevant to the field and its practices, such as educational and professional opportunities, scientific meetings, [3] [4] membership-derived issues and opinions, and important social and political issues. [5]
The AAI was founded on June 19, 1913, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a group of physicians who were attending the annual meeting of the American Medical Association. [1] The original 41 members of the society were all disciples of Almroth Wright, the founder and director of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary's Hospital in London. [6] The first AAI annual meeting was held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on June 22, 1914. [7]
AAI is led by a council of eight scientists who are elected by voting members of AAI. The council includes four officers—president, vice-president, secretary-treasurer, and past president—as well as four additional councilors. [8]
Loretta Doan became chief executive officer of AAI in January 2023. She had previously been chief science officer at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. In that role, she was most notable for her work on COVID-19 and for advancing diversity and inclusion. Before her tenure at AACC, Doan was director of science policy at the Endocrine Society. [9]
AAI is the publisher of The Journal of Immunology and ImmunoHorizons. The association also publishes the bimonthly AAI Newsletter, which informs members of developments in public policy, achievements of AAI members, meeting announcements, and other association news. [10]
AAI has 7,700 members in 68 countries. [11] Its membership includes principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, administrators, and other professionals dedicated to furthering the study of immunology.
Since 1919, 27 AAI members have been awarded the Nobel Prize. [12] [13] All laureates received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, except where indicated.
John Franklin Enders was an American biomedical scientist and Nobel Laureate. Enders has been called "The Father of Modern Vaccines."
George Davis Snell NAS was an American mouse geneticist and basic transplant immunologist.
Baruj Benacerraf was a Venezuelan-American immunologist, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the "discovery of the major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface protein molecules important for the immune system's distinction between self and non-self." His colleagues and shared recipients were Jean Dausset and George Davis Snell.
Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was a French immunologist born in Toulouse, France. Dausset received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980 along with Baruj Benacerraf and George Davis Snell for their discovery and characterisation of the genes making the major histocompatibility complex. Using the money from his Nobel Prize and a grant from the French Television, Dausset founded the Human Polymorphism Study Center (CEPH) in 1984, which was later renamed the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH in his honour. He married Rose Mayoral in 1963, with whom he had two children, Henri and Irène. Jean Dausset died on June 6, 2009, in Majorca, Spain, at the age of 92.
Michael Heidelberger was an American immunologist, often regarded as the father of modern immunology. He and Oswald Avery showed that the polysaccharides of pneumococcus are antigens, enabling him to show that antibodies are proteins. He spent most his early career at Columbia University and comparable time in his later years on the faculty of New York University. In 1934 and 1936 he received the Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967 he received the National Medal of Science, and then he earned the Lasker Award for basic medical research in 1953 and again in 1978. His papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
Tadamitsu Kishimoto is a Japanese immunologist known for research on IgM and cytokines, most famously, interleukin 6.
Elvin Abraham Kabat was an American biomedical scientist and one of the founding fathers of quantitative immunochemistry. Kabat was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1977, National Medal of Science in 1991, and American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He is the father of Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Immunogenetics or immungenetics is the branch of Medical Immunology and Medical Genetics that explores the relationship between the immune system and genetics.
Philippa "Pippa" Marrack, FRS is an English immunologist and academic, based in the United States, best known for her research and discoveries pertaining to T cells. Marrack is the Ida and Cecil Green Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Research at National Jewish Health and a distinguished professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Colorado Denver.
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian-American biologist, physician, and immunologist. He emigrated with his family to New York in 1923 at the age of 55 for professional opportunities, working for the Rockefeller Institute.
Frederick W. Alt is an American geneticist. He is a member of the Immunology section of the National Academy of Sciences and a Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is the Director of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, since 1987.
Henry George Kunkel was an American immunologist, known for his discoveries in basic immunology research, especially his contribution to the development of clinical immunology. He has been referred to as "the father of immunopathology."
Harvey Cantor is an American immunologist known for his studies of the development and immunological function of T lymphocytes. Cantor is currently the Baruj Benacerraf Professor of Immunology and Microbiology at the Harvard Medical School.
Tasuku Honjo is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1). He is also known for his molecular identification of cytokines: IL-4 and IL-5, as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.
Akiko Iwasaki is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, commensal bacteria, COVID-19, and long COVID.
William Erwin Paul was an American immunologist. He and Maureen Howard discovered interleukin 4, while an independent team led by Ellen Vitetta did the same in 1982. Paul worked on AIDS research for much of his career at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He served as president of the American Association of Immunologists from 1986 to 1987.
Manfred Martin Mayer was a German-born, American microbiologist and immunologist. He is considered the founder of complement research.
Leslie Joan Berg is an American immunologist. As a professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, she was elected the 95th president of the American Association of Immunologists for a one-year term from 2011 to 2012. Berg’s research focuses on understanding the signal transduction pathways—the succession of reactions inside the cell as it changes one kind of stimulus, or signal, into another—important for T-cell development and activation, and the generation of protective immunity to infections.
Linda A. Sherman is an American immunologist who researches the role of T cells in autoimmunity, particularly type 1 diabetes, in transplant rejection and in the response to tumor cells. She spent most of her career at Scripps Research, where she has been a professor of immunology and microbial sciences since 1997. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists and served as the society's president in 2014–15.