Santiago González F.

Santiago F. González holds two PhD degrees, one in microbiology from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and one in immunology from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). From January 2007 to September 2011 he was a postdoc in the group of Michael Carroll at the Immune Disease Institute, Harvard Medical School, in Boston (USA). He has been awarded three EU Marie Curie Fellowships, one for his postgraduate studies in Denmark where he studied skin inflammation and the connection between innate and adaptive responses from a molecular perspective. The second fellowship was a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship awarded in 2008 for a project shared between Harvard Medical School and the National Center for Biotechnology (Madrid). The project focused on the study of the defense mechanism against Influenza virus. The third fellowship is the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant to establish his group at the IRB. He has published several papers related with antigen trafficking, memory B cell, and the regulation of the immune system in high impact journals. During his work at Harvard he studied the transport mechanism of an influenza vaccine in the lymph node. He found that dendritic cells residing in the lymph node medulla use the lectin receptor SIGN-R1 to capture lymph-borne influenza virus and promote humoral immunity. These results have important implications for the generation of durable humoral immunity to viral pathogens through vaccination and were published in Nature Immunology. In November 2012 he joined the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona as a group leader studying pathogen-host interaction.