Dr. Merad is an internationally acclaimed physician-scientist and a leader in the fields of dendritic cell and macrophage biology with a focus on their contribution to human diseases. Dr. Merad identified the tissue resident  macrophage lineage and revealed its distinct role in organ physiology and pathophysiology. She established the contribution of this macrophage lineage to cancer progression and inflammatory diseases and is now working on the development of novel macrophage-targeted therapies for these conditions. In addition to her work on macrophages, Dr. Merad is known for her work on dendritic cells, a group of cells that control adaptive immunity. She identified a new subset of dendritic cells, which is now considered a key target of antiviral and antitumor immunity.

Dr. Merad leads the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine (PrIISM) to bring immunology discoveries to the clinic. PrIISM integrates immunological research programs with synergistic expertise in biology, medicine, technology, physics, mathematics and computational biology to enhance our understanding of human immunology. She also founded the Human Immune Monitoring Center at Mount Sinai, one of the world’s most sophisticated research centers, which uses cutting-edge single-cell technology to understand the contribution of immune cells to major human diseases or treatment responses.  .

Dr. Merad has authored more than 200 primary papers and reviews in high profile journals. Her work has been cited several thousand times. She receives generous funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research on innate immunity and their contribution to human disease, and belongs to several NIH consortia. She is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the recipient of the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology. She is the President-elect of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS).  In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of her contributions to the field of immunology.

Per I Arvidsson is Director of the national Swedish Drug Discovery & Development Platform at Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab DDD). He is also a fractional research professor at the College of Health Science, UKZN, and South Africa. Before joining SciLifeLab & Karolinska Institutet in 2013 to set up the SciLifeLab DDD platform, Prof. Arvidsson held various roles at the CNS & Pain iMED at AstraZeneca, Södertälje, the last being Director for late-stage pre-clinical and clinical neuroscience drug discovery. His accolades include several professorship positions at Uppsala University in Sweden and postdoctoral studies with Prof. D. Seebach at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Prof. Arvidsson is named inventor on some 15+ patent applications, and co-author to some 100 peer-reviewed publications, two of which have won “most cited papers” awards.