Ronald N. Germain

Immunologist and system biologist Ronald N. Germain is the Chief of the Lymphocyte Biology Section and Laboratory of Systems Biology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an NIH Distinguished Investigator in the Lymphocyte Biology Section, and Director of the Center for Advanced Tissue Imaging and associate director of the Trans-NIH Center for Human Immunology, Inflammation, and Autoimmunity at NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. NIAID, within NIH, strives to understand, treat, and ultimately prevent the myriad infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases that threaten millions of human lives.

Germain’s current emphasis on using advanced optical imaging methods to study the spatio-temporal basis of host defense and immunopathology in a tissue context. His research has explored the relationship between immune tissue organization and control of immunity studied using dynamic and static in situ microscopic methods that his laboratory helped pioneer.

Since receiving his doctoral degrees, he has led a laboratory investigating basic immunobiology. He and his colleagues have made key contributions to our understanding of MHC class II molecule structure–function relationships, the cell biology of antigen processing, and the molecular basis of T cell recognition.

Germain has published more than 300 scholarly research papers and reviews and serves on the editorial boards of many scientific journals. He has trained more than 70 postdoctoral fellows, many of whom hold senior academic and administrative positions at leading universities and medical schools.

Germain received his Sc.B. and Sc.M. from Brown University in and his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School and Harvard University.