The Immune Alliance - a German-Japanese Cooperation in Immunology Bilateral Cooperation

Yoko Hamazaki received her Ph.D. in epithelial cell biology from the Graduate School of Medicine at Kyoto University under the supervision of the late Prof. Shoichiro Tsukita. She then joined the laboratory of Prof. Nagahiro Minato, now the president of Kyoto University, where she began her research on thymic epithelial cell (TEC) development and identified progenitor/stem cells of medullary TECs in mice. In 2017, she became an independent professor at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, and launched a new project utilizing iPS cell technology. Her current research focuses on human T-cell aging associated with thymic involution and the reconstitution of thymic function using iPS cells.

The research of Jürgen Wienands centers around the (patho-) physiology of the activation of B lymphocytes and their terminal differentiation into antibody-secreting plasma cells. That focus was inspired already in the 1980’s, when he graduated with Dr. Michael Reth at the Institute of Genetics, Cologne, in the Department of Immunology, headed by Dr. Klaus Rajewsky. Between 1989 and 1992 he conducted his Ph.D. thesis in the group of Dr. Michael Reth at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg, Department Dr. Georges Köhler. After his postdoc period in Basel, Switzerland, Jürgen Wienands started his own laboratory in the Department of Molecular Immunology, jointly headed by the Max Planck Institute and the University of Freiburg. In 2001, he was appointed as Full Professor of Biochemistry and Immunology at Bielefeld University. He moved to the University Medical Center Göttingen in 2004 as Professor and Director of the Institute of Immunology and Dean of Research since 2020. Dr. Wienands served as President of the German Society for Immunology (DGfI) and acted as member of several advisory boards, including the Central Biosafety Commission of the German Government Berlin, the Senate Committees of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Leibniz Foundation, or the national review boards for personal research grants in Germany and Denmark.