Immunologist Peter Doherty To Speak At Institute For Advanced Study

Peter C. Doherty, Nobel laureate and chair of the Department of Immunology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., will speak on “Dealing With Virus Infections” on April 24 at the Institute for Advanced Study. The lecture, sponsored by the Program in Theoretical Biology, will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus.

Doherty will discuss ways in which the immune system combats viral infections, and review some of the major discoveries and advances of modern immunology.

Doherty earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in veterinary science at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a Ph.D. in pathology at the University of Edinburgh. He has held research and teaching positions at the Moredun Research Institute in Edinburgh; the Department of Microbiology, and also Department of Experimental Pathology, at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, Canberra; and the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.

He assumed his present position at St. Jude in 1988. He is also adjunct professor in the departments of pathology and pediatrics at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, College of Medicine. From 1998 to 2001 he was a professorial fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Doherty’s research interests include cell-mediated immunity, immunological tolerance, viral immunology, and immunopathology; he is author or co-author of approximately 350 research papers, book chapters, and review articles.

A Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Australian Academy of Science, Doherty was named Australian of the Year in 1997. Among other honors, he won the Erlich Prize for Immunology in 1983, and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1995. He received the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with R. Zinkernagel) for “discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defense.”