Fellow

Brigitta Stockinger established a reputation as an imaginative and thoughtful experimental immunologist in the field of in vivo tolerance early in her career, based initially on Peter Medawar’s model of neonatally induced tolerance to alloantigens. After finding evidence for a non-deletional mechanism in this model, she established more tractable in vivo systems in which the molecular identity of the self antigen was known, exemplified by the C5 component of complement. In this context, her work on the crucial role of invariant chain in antigen presentation of C5 for thymic selection broke new ground. She used T cell receptor transgenics created by herself and those of her colleagues, to explore questions of repertoire selection with special reference to autoimmunity and tolerance induction. She also contributed a new understanding of the various receptor/ligand interactions required to establish and maintain immunological memory in the T cell compartment, and showed that the size of naïve and memory pool are independently regulated by homeostatic mechanisms. She has provided novel insight into the nature of regulatory cells, and conclusively demonstrated that under physiological, non-lymphopoietic conditions, T cells of several different lineages and phenotypes can act as regulatory cells. Her work is important for an understanding of perturbations resulting in autoimmunity, and for optimising effector and memory T cell responses to exogenous antigens. Her publication record includes a large number of papers in high impact immunology and cell biology journals, and she is a frequently invited speaker to national and international meetings. She has developed a strong research group at the National Institute for Medical Research, providing training for a series of excellent postgraduate and postdoctoral fellows over the past 13 years.