Nicole Boucheron performed her PhD studies in Biochemistry and Immunology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, where she worked in the group of Immanuel Luescher on activation of CD8+ T cells. In 2002, she joined the group of Wilfried Ellmeier at the Institute of Immunology in Vienna as postdoctoral fellow. Her work helped to understand important pathways that regulate CD4+ T-cell differentiation and she also revealed an unexpected plasticity of CD4+ T-cells towards the CD8 lineage. For her work she received the Sanofi Aventis Prize 2014. Since 2018, she established her own research group with a focus on the molecular control of T helper cell activation and differentiation during immune responses and disease. Current projects focus on molecular determinants for the differentiation of murine and human naïve CD4+ T cells into T follicular helper cells in autoimmunity and Th2 effector cells during allergic airway disease. She is particularly interested in how early signaling and endocytic processes intersect with epigenetic and transcriptional regulation to shape fate decisions and disease control in T helper cells. Nicole Boucheron is a mother of two children.

Shinya Sakaguchi is a group leader at the Institute of Immunology, Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology (CePII), Medical University of Vienna. After completing his Master’s degree in Medical Science in 2002 at the University of Tokyo, Japan, he joined the PhD program of Molecular Biology at the University of Vienna, Austria. After completing his PhD, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the current institution. He was appointed Assistant Professor at the Medical University of Vienna in 2016 and promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. The current main research topic of his group is to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the differentiation of peripheral CD8+ T cells, particularly focusing on transcriptional and epigenetic regulations of T cell exhaustion. He has received the Karl Landsteiner Prize from the Austrian Society for Allergology and Immunology and the Sanofi Aventis Prize.

Dietmar Herndler-Brandstetter performed his PhD studies in Immunology/Biogerontology at the Institute for Biomedical Aging Research in Innsbruck, Austria. As a FLARE Postdoctoral Fellow, he continued his research on human T cell biology and aging in Innsbruck and at the University of Birmingham (UK). In 2011, he joined the Richard A. Flavell lab at Yale University (USA) as an Erwin Schrödinger Postdoctoral Fellow, where he analyzed the plasticity of effector CD8+ T cells and used next-generation humanized mouse models to study cancer immunotherapies. In 2018, he joined the Center for Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna, where he is using humanized mouse models and patient-derived colorectal cancers (PDX) to study the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment and test novel cancer immunotherapies. He was awarded the Karl Landsteiner Prize and in 2025 he was appointed Ap. Professor in the field of Tumor Immunology.

Peter Steinberger has studied Biology in Graz and Vienna and did his PhD at the University of Vienna (1992-1996). Following postdoctoral studies with Carlos Barbas 3^rd at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California (1996-1999), he joined the group of Walter Knapp at the Institute of Immunology. Since 2007 he heads the research group “Immune Receptors and T cell activation” at the Institute of Immunology, Medical University of Vienna. His research focuses on cell engineering, the interaction of surface receptors on immune cells with their ligands and the regulation of human T cell responses. His team is engineering cellular tools that can be used to assess T cell receptors and chimeric antigen receptors as well as the contribution of individual receptor-ligand pairs to T cell activation processes.