Paola Ricciardi-Castagnoli

Paola Ricciardi-Castagnoli, former adjunct Professor of Immunology at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Max Planck Institute for Infectiology in Berlin and of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) Biology and Health Strategic Board in Paris. She was a former member of the Scientific Council of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 2007, together with Professor Philippe Kourilsky, she founded the Singaporean Society of Immunology (SgSI). On June 2, 2012 the President of the Italian Republic G. Napolitano, awarded Professor Ricciardi-Castagnoli with the honour “Ufficiale dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia. Al merito della Repubblica Italiana” for her work conducted in Singapore.

Professor Paola Ricciardi-Castagnoli is a member of EMBO and of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Since 2002, she has been the President of the European Network of Immunology Institutes (ENII) and Chair of the IFREC-SIgN Winterschool on Advanced Immunology.

Between 1998 and 2010 Professor Ricciardi-Castagnoli was Chair of Immunology and General Pathology at the University of Milano-Bicocca. From 1975-1998 she was a member of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) in Milan and has also been a visiting scientist at MIT and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She graduated at the University of Florence in Biological Sciences and did a PhD in Immunology at the University Catholic of Louvain in Belgium.

Paola Ricciardi-Castagnoli has studied innate immunity over the last 30 years. Her laboratory is involved in the study of myeloid cells, and in particular dendritic cells (DC), significantly contributing to the identification of the central role of DC in regulating immunity. The present focus of her laboratory is dissecting the molecular mechanisms that DC employ to regulate immunity. Over the course of her career she has formed close collaborative links with many leading groups in the dendritic cell field. In 1996 she organized the 4th International Symposium of Dendritic Cells. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Dendritic Cells founded by Ralph Steinman. Her laboratory was among the first to identify the key role that DC play in both innate and adaptive immune responses via the use of innate receptors such as the Toll-Like Receptors (TLRs). She contributed to the discovery that TLR4 is the receptor for LPS, a finding that led to the award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Bruce Beutler in 2011. With her research group, Professor Paola Ricciardi-Castagnoli has published >300 publications in international peer reviewed journals, with >43,800 citations with an H-index of 83 (as of 2022) .

Paola Ricciardi-Castagnoli (born September 14, 1948), is an Italian Immunologist based in Siena, Italy. Paola is the scientific director of Toscana Life Sciences Foundation (TLS) in Siena. She was former scientific director of the Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN).