The Committee on Immunology

The Committee on Immunology offers a graduate program of study leading to the Ph.D. in Immunology, as well as an undergraduate Specialization in Immunology, and courses for medical students.  The program provides multidisciplinary training in all aspects of Immunology that includes a core immunology curriculum and several advanced graduate level courses in specialized areas.  The training also integrates the basic biological sciences with the clinical sciences in an effort to develop new immunological approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of various immune diseases and cancer.  Approximately thirty students are enrolled in the Ph.D. program, which has won training grant support from the NIH continuously for over thirty years.

                                                   

    Harinder Singh, Ph.D.

Chairman

Letter from the Chairman

Why Immunology?

Immunology is a biological science that examines host defense mechanisms against pathogens and other harmful agents, and their involvement in curing or causing a wide variety of medical conditions.  Understanding the making of our own immune system, and retracing its origins and changes in various species over evolutionary time, is a fascinating adventure that can lead you to some incredibly exciting scientific and technological challenges.  For example, how does the immune system become activated to attack invading pathogens?  What strategies of recognition maximize detection yet minimize responses to self antigens?  How are the immune system's effector mechanisms tailored to reject vastly different sorts of pathogens?  How is immunological memory formed and maintained?  How do body tissues talk to the immune system and how is their function preserved in the midst of immune attack?  How do lymphocytes develop and set up their specialized microenvironments?  Finally, how do pathogens, the most indefatigable students of immunology, manipulate the immune system to their benefit?

No less than twenty-three Nobel prizes have been awarded to immunologists, justly so because of the enormous impact of their discoveries to human health.  The citation of the first Nobel prize awarded to an immunologist, von Behring, for the discovery of serum immunotherapy against tetanus and diphteria, read: "He has opened a new road in the domain of medical science and thereby placed in the hands of the physician a victorious weapon against illness and death".

Immunologists have also invented and/or driven many of the technologies that revolutionized biology, including the separation of proteins by mass or charge, automated protein sequencing, mammalian gene cloning, hybridomas and monoclonal antibodies, flow cytometry and cell sorting, inbred and recombinant inbred mouse strains, mouse genome-wide mutagenesis screens, database mining methods, real-time multiphoton imaging of cellular interactions in tissues, etc...

Immunology is fun!  In a single experimental setting in vivo, one can now describe a very complex, orchestrated series of interactions involving dozens of cell-types in different parts of the body, hundreds of meaningful molecular interactions, thousands of gene activation events, to understand how changes in genetic or environmental factors may lead to health, or illness and death.

Immunology is useful!  The ability to control immunological processes has inspired multiple strategies of specific immune intervention which have already transformed the outlook of many severe medical conditions such as Immunodeficiencies, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Organ Transplants, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and hold promise for near future treatments of Cancer, Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, and Type I Diabetes.

At the University of Chicago, immunology flourishes as an interdisciplinary endeavor that completely integrates the basic sciences with the clinical sciences.  This philosophy, which is embodied in the interdepartmental and interdisciplinary structure of the Committee on Immunology, has been an important factor in recruiting top students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty to the University of Chicago. Indeed, the University of Chicago has been a stronghold of Immunology for over thirty years.  An inordinate proportion of students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of the Committee on Immunology produce seminal research work and go on to extraordinary careers of scientific accomplishments and leadership.  With over thirty laboratories covering the most exciting areas of basic and applied research, a cutting edge technological platform, an outstanding series of intellectual activities, the Committee on Immunology is an energizing interdisciplinary environment for immunological research at the highest level.