Our Team

Violetta L. Horton Professor, and Director. Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, Department of Pathology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Fellow at ChEM-H (Chemistry, Engineering and Medicine for Human Health), Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford University.

Bali Pulendran is the Violetta L. Horton Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Director of the Institute for Immunology, Transplantation, and Infection, at Stanford University. He received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D., from the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, under the supervision of Sir Gustav Nossal. He then did his post-doctoral work at Immunex Corporation in Seattle.

Dr. Pulendran’s research has helped define major paradigms in vaccinology and immunology. Dr. Pulendran pioneered the use of systems approaches to probe immunity to vaccination and infection in humans. In addition, Dr. Pulendran discovered that dendritic cells, one of the key cell types orchestrating the immune response, consist of multiple subtypes, which are functionally distinct. He also discovered the mechanisms by which microbial stimuli program DCs to modulate T-helper responses and helped establish Flt3-Ligand as the key growth factor for DCs in vivo.

Dr. Pulendran’s research is published in front line journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Medicine, and Nature Immunology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of several honors and awards, including two concurrent MERIT awards from the NIH, the Albert Levy Prize, the ViE Award for the Best Research Team at the World Vaccine Congress, and  is listed on Thomson Reuter’s list of Highly Cited Researchers, which recognizes the world's most influential researchers of the past decade, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations.