Immunology Meets Philosophy vol. 2
15-16 September 2025
Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, Prague
This event features experts working on a range of phenomena related to the diverse host-microbe interactions, from infectious diseases to microbiota, with a wide array of perspectives, including evolutionary and metabolic ones.
Registration is required for this event. You may register here.
Confirmed speakers
Janelle Ayres
Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
How a host responds to a pathogen determines outcome of infection, and the long-standing belief was that a host needed to kill an invading pathogen in order to survive. Ayres’ discovery of the host “co-operative defense” system has challenged this notion. As part of her paradigm-shifting work, Ayres showed that a host can employ disease tolerance defenses executed by the co-operative defense system during infection that limits pathology and promotes host survival while having no effect on the pathogen. Ayres made a number of other breakthroughs in this area, revealing not only more about fundamental, dynamic biological processes but also charting discoveries that have potential translational applications for treating a wide array of diseases as well as ways to promote healthy aging.
David Schneider
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University
We study innate immunity and microbial pathogenesis. We have been studying models for a variety of bacterial infections including: Listeria, Mycobacteria, Salmonella and Streptococcus as well as some fungi, malaria and viruses. Our current focus is to determine how we recover from infections.
We are using a new approach to study the outcome of infections. We are starting by plotting health by microbe number over the course of infections. This produces characteristic phase plots that we think can be used to predict the outcome of infections and to define appropriate treatments. We like to assess “health” in whole animals rather than in vitro but we use a large range of tools ranging from genetics, to microarray analyses to flow cytometry.
We focus on two models. We recently started working on a mouse model for malaria in which we follow the progress of a Plasmodium chabaudi infection. We are making extremely mutlivariate plots of the disease process. Our goal is to define “biovectors” that predict the outcome of infection and to identify the physiological mechanisms required for recovery from infections.
We continue to work on fruit flies as a model for microbial pathogenesis. Here we take advantage of the spectacularly deep genetic tools available to Drosophila geneticists to discover mechanisms involved in pathogenesis and the recovery from infections.
Tracy Hussell
Professor of Inflammatory Disease & Director of the Lydia Becker Institute of Immunology and Inflammation
Tamar Schneider
Open University of Israel
Dr. Tamar Schneider is a philosopher of science working on the notion of individuality in relation to its close and intimate microbial milieu, as they appear in ecology, evolution, and medicine. Her work is guided by the heuristics of mutuality of interactions and its unique role in constructing knowledge of systems and processes in biology.
More speakers will be confirmed in due time.