Monash scientists win sought-after US immunology fellowship
Two Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) researchers have been jointly awarded an American Association of Immunologists (AAI) Careers in Immunology Fellowship – a rare honour for Australian scientists.
Laboratory head Dr Kim Good-Jacobson and one of her research fellows, Dr Andrea Di Pietro, have been awarded an AAI Fellowship for their research project ‘Epigenetic regulation of humoral immune responses’.
The AAI Fellowship program supports career development of young scientists by providing eligible principal investigators with a year of salary support for a trainee in their lab.
“The first years of establishing a lab are a critical period and so it is fantastic to receive this extra support for a post-doctoral fellow in my lab, particularly given the limited funding from the NHMRC at the moment,” Dr Good-Jacobson said.
“It’s great for Andrea as it means he’s able to complete and publish his work. It will assist his career, providing a base to attain more funding as a fellow in the future, and eventually work towards research independence,” she said.
The AAI Fellowship will allow the two investigators to continue their work into immune memory and viral infection.
As part of their successful application Drs Good-Jacobson and Di Pietro will look at why immunological memory does not function properly in response to chronic viral pathogens
such as HIV, probing the role of certain epigenetic enzymes in the immune response.
“Once we determine how these enzymes work during normal effective immune responses then we’ll look at chronic viral infection to determine if the enzymes are appropriately regulated. If they are dysfunctional, we will test whether this dysfunction results in ineffective antibody memory,” Dr Good-Jacobson said.
“It is a great honour for me to be awarded with this prestigious fellowship that will allow me to further investigate the ongoing research under the guidance of Dr Good-Jacobson,” Dr Di Pietro said.
“I am very excited to be given the chance to continue to work on this project since I deeply believe its outcomes will be of fundamental importance to our community. It has potential to open up new therapeutic interventions for chronic infectious diseases that currently lack effective treatment,” he said.
Dr Di Pietro joined Dr Good-Jacobson’s lab in 2014 after completing his PhD at San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy, where he revealed a novel role of TRIM22 protein as antiviral factor of the innate immunity against influenza viruses.
Dr Good-Jacobson is a NHMRC Career Development Fellow and holds a 2016 Victorian Young Tall Poppy Science Award.
The American Association of Immunologists is a body of professionally trained scientists from all over the world. It owns and publishes The Journal of Immunology. Dr Good-Jacobson and Dr Di Pietro’s AAI Fellowship will begin in September 2018.