Arturo Zychlinsky

Arturo Zychlinsky is Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, where he has been Head of the Department of Cellular Microbiology since 2001. He studied biology at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Mexico D.F., Mexico (1980 – 1985). In 1991, he received his PhD in Immunology from the Rockefeller University, New York, USA. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. From 1993 to 2001, he was a professor at the Skirball Institute and the Department of Microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine. Arturo Zychlinsky made several fundamental contributions including the first description that bacterial pathogens cause cell death and therefore induce inflammation. He worked on the activation of Toll Like Receptors and their role in immunity and he has made key contributions to understanding the role of neutrophils in innate immunity, including the discovery of NETs, the description of Netosis, a novel form of cell death required for the release of NETs, the mechanism of NET formation, the role of NETs in immunity and autoimmunity.