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Dissecting the human immune response

16 March 2015. 
A Lanzavecchia, Institute for Biomedical Research, Bellinzona.

The second Marco Fraccaro lecture will be given on the 16th of March 2015 by Antonio Lanzavecchia. The poster of the lecture can be downloaded here

Marco Fraccaro (26 September 1926 - 2 April 2008) was a distinguished geneticist and Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pavia for over thirty years. Born in Pavia, he attended the local Liceo Classico Ugo Foscolo with and the Medical School of the University of Pavia where he graduated in 1950. After a few years at the local Institute of Pathological Anatomy he moved to Lionel Penrose in the Galton Laboratory at UCL in 1954 with a fellowship from the British Council and, a year later, to Jan Book’s laboratory in Uppsala where he stayed until 1958 during which time he met his future wife Inga. In 1960, he moved to the newly formed MRC Population Genetics Research Unit in Oxford under Alan Stevenson where he continued his work on cytogenetics that he had initiated in Uppsala. He returned to Pavia in 1962 where he started a highly successful and productive laboratory with funding from NATO and EURATOM and where he took up the Chair of Human Genetics, which he held until 2001. Throughout his research Marco Fraccaro focussed primarily on sex chromosome abnormalities, especially the genetic abnormalities responsible for abnormal physical and sexual development, but he contributed to several other areas of Genetics such as the distribution in the population of specific types of congenital malformations and the effect of radiation on chromosomes of cells. Marco Fraccaro was deeply attached to Pavia and Oxford and there was hardly a conversation in which he failed to mention the life and history of these two cities. His love for Oxford was also expressed in a small book of quotations (Oxford for strangers of all sorts) which he published in 1997. From 1971 until 2002 he was Master of Collegio Cairoli, one of the University Colleges at Pavia. He run the College informally and effectively and made Cairoli a place of learning and debate for students and staff. He also made it into a meeting point for modern visual arts by organising a successful series of exhibitions of modern artists that will enrich the College for years to come. Marco Fraccaro has been one of the defining personalities of the University of Pavia in the second half of the 20th century and the lecture aims to recognise his interests in Science and the Arts and his intellectual legacy.

Antonio Lanzavecchia earned a degree in Medicine at the University of Pavia where he specialized in Paediatrics and in Infectious Diseases. From 1983 to 1999, he worked at the Basel Institute for Immunology and since 1999 he is the Director of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona. He taught immunology at the Universities of Genova and Siena and since 2009 is Professor of Human Immunology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich. He is Member of the EMBO and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Awarded the EMBO medal in 1988 and the Cloëtta prize in 1999, Antonio Lanzavecchia published more than 270 papers. His research has covered several aspects of immunology: from antigen processing and presentation to dendritic cell biology, from lymphocyte activation and trafficking to T and B cell memory.