Bali Pulendran is new director of Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection

Bali Pulendran, PhD, professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology, has been appointed director of Stanford Medicine’s Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection.

Pulendran, the Violetta L. Horton Professor II, assumed the directorship on Aug. 1. He succeeds Mark Davis, PhD, founding director of the institute, who is stepping down from the post after 20 years to concentrate on advancing the work in his laboratory.

“Mark is a true visionary whose discoveries in immunology are legendary,” Pulendran said. “He’s had a transformative impact on human immunology and spawned a whole generation of scientists who are today’s leaders in this exciting field.”

The institute, known as ITI, is a collaborative effort of interdisciplinary teams composed of immunologists, infectious-disease experts, computational scientists, clinical scientists and clinicians, driven by a common goal of understanding the human immune system at the molecular level and translating this understanding into better vaccines and therapeutics. Insights into systems immunology are attained by gauging widespread activities and interactions of multiple molecules, genes and cells in blood and tissue samples from people responding to infections or receiving vaccinations.

“Bali Pulendran has the experience, skills and knowledge to lead ITI into the future,” said Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the School of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs at Stanford University. “A collaborative and multidisciplinary scientist, Bali has made significant strides in advancing global health by creating greater understanding of how vaccines interact with our bodies and using that knowledge to make them even more effective. His insights and leadership will only further the ability of ITI scientists to pioneer the field of systems immunology.”

Pulendran runs a roughly 50-person lab with a research interest in learning how the evolutionarily ancient innate immune system regulates the workings of its relatively recent partner, the adaptive immune system, and how to harness that new understanding to designing improved and novel vaccines. He has co-authored nearly 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, many in front-line publications such as Nature, Science and Cell, and has trained more than 50 postdoctoral scholars and graduate students.

“Bali has just been a ball of fire in using the latest technologies to understand human vaccine response,” Davis said. “He has done more than anyone in the world to understand how vaccines work.”

Pulendran came to Stanford Medicine in 2017, leaving his positions as a chaired professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and director of the innate immunity program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Davis recruited Pulendran, whom he has known since 2008, to Stanford Medicine. “He was doing the first really inspiring work on using the systems-immunology approach,” said Davis, the Burt and Marion Avery Family Professor and a professor of microbiology and immunology. “I had independently come to realize that this was the way forward because conventional approaches weren’t working. This has become the standard approach now.”

Pulendran, born in Sri Lanka, obtained a bachelor’s degree at Cambridge University’s Queens College. He attended graduate school at the University of Melbourne, Australia, receiving his PhD in 1995. After serving as a postdoctoral scholar at Immunex Corp. in Seattle, then holding assistant and associate professorships at the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research in Dallas, he joined Emory’s faculty as an associate professor in 2002. Promoted to full professor in 2004, he became director of Emory’s innate immunity program in 2008, receiving a chaired professorship that same year.

“I hope to see the ITI soar along its innovative trajectory of discovering fundamental new biology about our human system and collaborating with partners to translate these discoveries into novel medicines and vaccines,” Pulendran said.