Since 2019, the Adaptive Immunology Lab is headed by Professor Susan Schlenner, her research group is the Molecular Treg group.

Prof Schlenner obtained her PhD from the University of Ulm, Germany. At the Institute for Immunology (Prof Hans-Reimer Rodewald), she studied molecular mechanisms of innate immunity with focus on mast cells and the developmental plasticity of T cell progenitors. To this end, she developed in vivo systems that allowed the undisturbed study of these and other cell types, in vivo tools later on used by many other laboratories.

She then joined the laboratory of Prof Harald von Boehmer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. During her postdoctoral training she studied the consequences of loss of TGFb signaling to the genetic locus of the Treg hallmark transcription factor FoxP3.

In 2012, she moved to Belgium to join the Autoimmune Genetics / Translational Immunology laboratory of Prof Adrian Liston. As a senior fellow, she worked on multiple research projects in the area of Treg biology, Treg plasticity and autoimmune diseases, while developing her own research track.

Her successful work was recognized with a research professorship by the University of Leuven in 2018, allowing her to focus her group on two research areas that are particularly close to her heart: plasticity of Treg and RNA modifications in T cells.

Susan Schlenner has published 30 papers including key publications in the fields of:

• Innate Immunity (Schneider, Schlenner, Feyerabend et al, JEM 2007; Akahoshi et al, JCI 2011)
• Hematopoietic progenitors (Schlenner et al, Immunity 2010; Martins et al, JEM 2012; Busch et al, Nature 2015)
• Treg biology (Schlenner et al, JEM 2012; Pierson et al, Nature Immunology 2013; Franckaert et al, ICB 2015; Brajic et al, Front Immunol 2018)
• Autoimmune disease (Dooley et al, Nature Genetics 2016; Schlenner et al, Ann Rheum Dis 2018)

Complete list of publications can be found here.