Inside Duke Medicine

Chancellor’s Lecture Series: Philippa Marrack, Ph.D.

Philippa Marrack, Ph.D. will present “Gender and B Cells” for the seventh Chancellor's Lecture, cosponsored by the Chancellor's Science Advisory Council.

Marrack is Distinguished Professor at the National Jewish Health and University of Colorado and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Reception
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Hall of Science
Levine Science Research Center (LSRC), Duke University

Lecture
4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Love Auditorium
Levine Science Research Center (LSRC), Duke University
 

More about Professor Marrack:

Philippa Marrack took her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at New Hall, Cambridge. For her Ph.D. she worked with Dr. Alan Munro in the Department of Biochemistry and at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology on Hills Road. In 1971, she left the UK for the University of California at San Diego, where she did postdoctoral work with Dr. Richard Dutton. Since then she has worked at the University of Rochester in upstate New York and at the National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado. She is currently an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Distinguished Professor at National Jewish Health and the University of Colorado, Denver.

Because of a lucky break and persuasion by Dr. Munro, in 1967 Dr. Marrack began to work on T cells, crucial cells of the immune system which had been discovered independently by Drs. Miller and Good only a few years earlier. In collaboration with her husband, Dr. John Kappler, Dr. Marrack discovered how T cells distinguish between invading organisms and their own host. These investigations also showed that some bacteria and viruses are particularly damaging because they produce powerful stimulants of the immune system which, paradoxically, kill rather than protect their hosts. Recently Dr. Marrack has been studying adjuvants, crucial components of human and animal vaccines.

Dr. Marrack is a member of the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences, USA. She has received many awards including the Royal Society Wellcome Foundation Prize, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaädter Prize, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize-Columbia University, the Rabbi Shai Shackner Prize-University of Jerusalem, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Immunologists and the L’Oreal UNESCO Women in Science Award.