Professor of Immunology, Director of the “Microenvironment & Immunity” unit of the Institut Pasteur and INSERM, Director of the Department of Immunology, Institut Pasteur, Paris

Gérard Eberl, PhD, has been Professor of Immunology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris since 2014 and is head of the “Microenvironment & Immunity” joint unit of the Institut Pasteur and INSERM. He completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Lausanne in 1995 and subsequently undertook postdoctoral work, first at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and then at New York University, before joining the Institut Pasteur in 2005 as head of a five-year group. It was here, at the Institut Pasteur, that he began researching the role of the symbiotic microbiota on the development and regulation of the immune system.

His research demonstrates the key role of the microbiota in the balance of immune responses and suggests that disrupting the microbiota results in increased reactivity of the immune system, which can lead to inflammatory diseases and susceptibility to infection. In collaboration with the Department of Neuroscience at the Institut Pasteur, he launched the “Major Federating Program Microbes & Brain”, which aims to understand the functional interactions between the microbiota, immune system and brain, and to describe how these interactions malfunction when they result in mental illness.

Gérard Eberl is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and an Associate Editor of Mucosal Immunology. He has been head of the Department of Immunology at the Institut Pasteur since 2015. He has received numerous awards for his transversal research in immunology and microbiology. He is the author of more than 125 articles and six patents concerning the regulation of immune responses.