Gabriel Victora named HHMI Investigator

Gabriel D. Victora

Gabriel D. Victora, Rockefeller’s Laurie and Peter Grauer Associate Professor, has been named an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of 26 new Investigators announced by HHMI today.

HHMI is the largest foundation in the United States dedicated to fundamental biomedical science research. With an endowment of around $24 billion, it supports more than 250 of the nation’s most innovative and impactful scientists, providing generous support for their laboratories for seven-year terms renewable following successful scientific reviews. Victora was selected as a new Investigator after rigorous review of a pool of nearly 1,000 applicants from across the nation. He is the latest in a lineage of 31 other Rockefeller scientists who have been named HHMI investigators, 25 of whom are currently serving on our faculty.

Victora heads the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Dynamics. Since coming to Rockefeller in 2016, he has conducted research investigating how the immune system produces targeted antibodies directed against specific antigens in response to pathogens and vaccines. Much of this work has focused on the mechanism of affinity maturation, a Darwinian process taking place within lymph nodes in which genes encoding antibodies go through rounds of mutation and selection, with B cells producing antibodies with the highest affinities being selected for further rounds of mutation and selection. Aside from the intrinsic beauty of these findings, they inform the development of more effective vaccines and help provide clues to how affinity maturation can malfunction to cause autoimmune disorders and allergies.

In another recent achievement, Victora’s lab reported on a  technology they developed to monitor transient interactions between immune cells and any other cell type in the body. The technique, called Universal LIPSTIC (uLIPSTIC), has far-reaching implications for reading out the cells that the immune system is interacting with in health and disease.