Jean-Luc Imler
Jean-Luc Imler, obtained his MSc degree from AgroParisTech in Paris in 1985 and his PhD from Strasbourg university in 1988. He then joined the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA in 1989 for his post-doctoral training. Returning to France in 1992, he first worked as a research scientist in the biotech company Transgene, before being appointed Professor of cell biology at the University of Strasbourg in 1994.
After becoming an independent scientist, J.-L. Imler joined as a group leader the Insect immunity Department chaired by Jules Hoffmann to work on the model organism drosophila. He first characterized the function and regulation of Toll, an evolutionarily conserved receptor playing a key role in the activation of innate immunity before switching, in 2002, to the study of antiviral immunity in drosophila.
Jean-Luc Imler is interested in evolutionarily conserved aspects of antiviral immunity, collaborating with the groups of Bruce Beutler (UT Southwestern, Dallas) and Shizuo Akira (Osaka University, Japan), to study in mice the orthologues of the genes identified in flies. J.-L. Imler’s team also recently started to collaborate with Pr. J. T. Marques (UFMG, Belo-Horizonte) in Brazil to investigate interactions between mosquitoes and the viruses they can transmit to humans, such as Dengue or Chikungunya.
As part of his Fellowship, Jean-Luc Imler is working on the project Antiviral innate immunity : from the Drosophila model to the vector mosquito Aedes aegypti.