The International Cytokine & Interferon Society proudly announces these 2025 Young Investigator Award winners.
The Sidney & Joan Pestka Graduate and Post-Graduate Awards, sponsored by PBL Assay Services
Post-graduate awardee, Alexander Lercher, PhD, The Rockefeller University is currently an HFSP long-term fellow and Harvey L. Karp postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Charles M. Rice at the Rockefeller University in New York. His research focuses on immunological decision points shaping viral disease and how past inflammatory events can result in durable antigen-independent innate immunity, enabling cross-protection against heterologous pathogens. He recently uncovered a mechanism whereby past SARS-CoV-2 infection and type I interferon signaling leads to establishment of epigenetic memory in alveolar macrophages that specifically enhances secondary antiviral responses. This potent antiviral innate immune memory was necessary and sufficient to ameliorate disease caused by secondary infection with the unrelated respiratory pathogen influenza A virus.
Kathleen Mills, Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, is the Graduate award winner. Ms. Mills was born in London, England, and grew up there and in North Carolina, USA. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, where she worked in Dr. Anne Sperling’s lab researching the protective effects of IL-5 in acute lung injury. Kathleen is a recent PhD graduate from Weill Cornell Graduate School in New York City, where she was in the Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis program. She was mentored by Dr. Tobias Hohl at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Her dissertation research focused on the role of GM-CSF in defense against a respiratory mold pathogen. She found that epithelial-immune cell crosstalk mediated by GM-CSF and downstream of IL-1 and IFN-λ is required for immune cell killing of fungal spores and subsequent host survival. This fall, she begins a postdoc at Boston University in the Center for Regenerative Medicine.
The ICIS-Christina Fleischmann Awardee for Excellence in Cytokine & Interferon Research recognizing a Young Woman Investigator, sponsored by the family of Dr. Christina Fleischmann
Autumn York, PhD, University of Washington School of Medicine, grew up outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She graduated with bachelor’s degrees in both Biochemistry and Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She earned her Ph.D. in Molecular and Medical Pharmacology from UCLA in 2016 under the supervision of Steven Bensinger, where she studied cholesterol regulation in the innate immune system. After, Dr. York conducted her postdoctoral training in Richard Flavell’s lab at Yale where her research focused on how lipid metabolic pathways regulated intestinal biology. Dr. York joined the Department of Immunology at the University of Washington in Seattle as an Assistant Professor in 2023. The York Lab continues to explore immuno-metabolic research themes, largely focusing on how cytokine signaling cascades impact de novo lipid biogenesis programs.
The ICIS-Amanda Proudfoot Award for Advances in Chemokine Biology by a Trainee, sponsored by the ICIS and Friends of Amanda Proudfoot
Anna-Lena Neehus, PhD, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, is an EMBO postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital. She received her PhD in Immunology from Paris Cité University under the mentorship of Prof. Jean-Laurent Casanova, working in the Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases at the Imagine Institute. Her PhD research focused on identifying and characterizing of inborn errors of immunity affecting phagocytes, including the first descriptions of complete human TNF and CCR2 deficiencies. She showed that human CCR2 is critical for monocyte recruitment into the alveolar space and that human CCR2 deficiency underlies susceptibility to pulmonary and mycobacterial disease.