29 April 2019
Professor Franca Ronchese has been recognised for her long and distinguished career in the field of immunology, presenting the prestigious Burnet Oration at the annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Immunology in Perth late last year.
The oration is named after the Nobel prize-winning Australian immunologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, and is the highest honour awarded by the Society. Speakers are chosen in recognition of their impact in advancing the field of immunology over the course of their career. We are immensely proud of Prof Ronchese and the journey that brought her to the Malaghan Institute.
Prof Ronchese first trained at the University of Padova, Italy before taking a postdoctoral fellow position in the Laboratory of Ron Germain at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA. After her postdoctoral studies, Prof Ronchese joined the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland, becoming interested in antigen presentation by dendritic cells in vivo. Since 1994 she has led the immune cell biology group at the Malaghan Institute. Recently, Prof Ronchese has published in Cell Systems in collaboration with the Weizmann Institute in Israel, research that has made significant strides in tracking the allergic response on a cell-by-cell level, teasing out the incredible rare but important activity that results in allergic disease.
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