Prof. Jean Pieters

Prof. der Biochemie
Cell Biology and Immunology, Biozentrum, Universität Basel,  Basel

Jean Pieters is professor of biochemistry at the Biozentrum, University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland. He obtained his doctoral degree in biochemistry from the Department of Medicine, University of Maastricht in 1989, after which he joined the laboratory of Bernhard Dobberstein at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany as a postdoctoral fellow. There, he initiated his work on the cell biology of antigen processing and presentation. In 1992, he joined the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands as a junior group leader and focused on the molecular and cellular basis of immune cell activation. He was recruited in 1996 to the Basel Institute for Immunology, Basel, Switzerland, and moved to the Biozentrum in 2002, where he now directs a group of scientist investigating signal transduction processes that are involved in the body’s immune defense. Among the contributions of his laboratory to a better understanding of immunity are the characterization of the intracellular events leading to antigen presentation, the discovery of immune evasion mechanisms employed by the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the discovery of a leukocyte specific signaling pathway essential for T cell survival. He is the recipient of several awards, among which the Sanofi Prize (1989), the Eppendorf Yong Investigator Award (1999), the Pfizer Award for Infectiology (2001) as well as the Friedrich Miescher Award (2002). In 2011, he was elected as a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Art and Sciences.