The New Department of Immunobiology

A letter from Dean Alpern
January 24, 2007

Dear Faculty, Students and Staff,

I am pleased to report that the Section of Immunobiology, which was established at the medical school as a small, independent academic unit in 1988, has been elevated to full departmental status by a recent decision of the Yale Corporation. This new designation was recommended by the university's Biological Sciences Advisory Committee, the chairs of the medical school's academic departments, the YSM Board of Permanent Officers and the YSM administration.

Led by Richard A. Flavell, Ph.D., the new department is home to 13 primary faculty members, including four investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, two members of the National Academy of Sciences and two members of the Royal Society. The faculty are widely recognized for their research at the forefront of areas such as lymphocyte development and activation, and their findings appear regularly in top-ranked journals. Within the department, the newly formed Human Translational Immunology group, made up of clinically trained immunologists, will concentrate on translational and clinical studies that link the department's strength in basic immunology even more closely to the clinical departments of the medical school. In this research, investigators will apply the principles of basic immunology to diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes and disorders of the vascular system.

Because of these many achievements, the department is regarded as one of the best immunology programs in the world. The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, whose rankings were reported earlier this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ranked immunology at Yale as No. 1 in the United States, based on data such as faculty publications, grants and honors and awards.

Please join me in congratulating all the members of the new Department of Immunobiology at Yale!

Robert J. Alpern, M.D.
Dean and Ensign Professor of Medicine