Axel Kallies Melbourne Immunotherapy Network Winter Retreat 2018

Axel Kallies

Axel Kallies is Professor for Molecular Immunology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He completed his PhD in Berlin, Germany, in 2002. After a postdoctoral period during which he studied plasma cell differentiation, he established his laboratory at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia. In 2017, he was recruited to the Department for Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne. His team studies the molecular and metabolic control of lymphocyte differentiation in response to antigen. The focus of the lab is on understanding molecular pathways required for CD8 T cell and regulatory T cell (Treg) differentiation. The Kallies lab has developed and applied genetic and molecular approaches to this field, including novel reporter mouse strains, metabolic techniques, transcriptional profiling, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) and accessible chromatin (ATAC) sequencing. They published several key studies in leading journals of the field, including Nature, Science, Immunity and Nature Immunology, which detail the roles of transcription factors and cytokines in differentiation, clonal expansion and cellular metabolism of lymphocytes. Over the last few years, the Kallies lab has developed a focus on linking transcriptional control and cellular metabolism of T cells in response to chronic infection and cancer.