Federica Sallusto received the degree of Doctor in Biology from the University of Rome in 1988, and performed post- doctoral work at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome and at the Basel Institute for Immunology, where she was a member from 1997 to 2000. Since 2000 she is Group leader of the Cellular Immunology Laboratory at the IRB where she has also established the Center of Medical Immunology. Since 2017, she is Full Professor in Medical Immunology at ETH Zurich and USI. For her scientific achievements, she received important prizes and awards (Pharmacia Allergy Research Foundation, Behring Lecture, Foundation for Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases and “I numeri Uno” prize from the Italian-Swiss Chamber of Commerce). She was elected member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina in 2009, member of EMBO in 2011 and international member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2022. From 2013 to 2015 she was president of the Swiss Society for Allergology and Immunology and from 2022 to 2024 President of the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS). From 2018 to 2024, she was member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and in 2022 she received the Doctor honoris causa from the Faculty of Science and Medicine of the University of Fribourg.
The Sallusto lab is focused on the understanding of the mechanisms that control T cell priming and regulate cytokine production and homing capacities. These questions are addressed primarily in the human system, where they combine the ex vivo analysis of memory T cell subsets with in vitro priming of naive T cells. This approach has led to the identification of chemokine receptors expressed in human Th17 and Th22 cells, and to the dissection of the cytokines that drive naive T cells polarization and modulate T cells effector functions. In parallel, they have used the mouse system to address fundamental questions on the regulation of lymphocyte trafficking during inflammation and in autoimmunity. They also developed a method for the analysis of human naive and memory CD4 and CD8 T cell repertoires based on high throughput cellular screenings of human T cell libraries. This method is currently used to dissect the human T cell response to pathogens, allergens, and self-antigens.