Watchdogs of the Brain: How Local Immune Cells Regulate Health and Disease

Dr. Haury is Chief Operating Officer at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, in Jupiter, FL. He is an accomplished scientist with a Ph.D. in Immunology from the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a postdoc at University of California, San Francisco. As Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Haury was instrumental in establishing the Gulbenkian Institute of Science (IGC) in Oeiras, Portugal, before joining the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany as Coordinator for Advanced Training. He then headed to Brussels to run a European Commission-funded research networking program.

Marco Prinz is Professor of Neuropathology and Chair of the Institute of Neuropathology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Dr. Prinz obtained his MD at the Charitè, Humboldt-University Berlin in 1997. He performed his residency in Neuropathology at the University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, where he studied the role of the peripheral and CNS-restricted immune system for the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases such as prion diseases. He was recruited to the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2008 and promoted to the rank of Full Professor and Chair of the Institute of Neuropathology. Dr. Prinz’s laboratory studies the mechanisms that regulate the development and function of the mononuclear phagocyte lineage in the central nervous system, including microglia and perivascular and meningeal macrophages. His laboratory has made seminal discoveries in CNS macrophage biology revealing their embryonic origin and their local maintenance in situ. Currently, his research group aims to understand myeloid cell biology in the CNS during health and disease and studies the impact of the immune system on the pathogenesis of neurological disorders such as neurodegenerative diseases, ultimately aimed at recognizing novel therapeutic strategies and targets to treat these central nervous system diseases.