Ronald Germain is an immunobiologist and currently Chief of the Laboratory of Systems Biology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA.
He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1976, before moving to Harvard Medical School and then the Lymphocyte Biology Section in the Laboratory of Immunology at the NIAID. He has made key contributions to our understanding of Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) class II molecule structure–function relationships, the cell biology of antigen processing and the molecular basis of T cell recognition.
Ronald’s laboratory is interested in the fundamental mechanisms that underlie how the immune system operates in health and disease. Over the last 15 years, he and his colleagues have pioneered the use of in vivo dynamic and multiplex static imaging. They’ve uncovered new insights into how the innate and adaptive immune systems are spatially organized, how their component cells behave dynamically, and how fine grained tissue organisation and cell movement combine to provide effective host defence against unpredictable threats at unanticipated sites in the body. He has also played a major role in bringing computational modelling into use in modern immunology and in applying systems biology approaches to basic and clinical research on the immune system.
Ronald is an Associate member of EMBO and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences USA in 2013. He received the Meritorious Career Award from the American Association of Immunologists in 2015.
