Major Symposium Guidance for Trainees

We are pleased to offer AAI member graduate students and postdoctoral fellows the opportunity to present their research in IMMUNOLOGY2024™ Major Symposia. Speakers will be selected from AAI trainee member-submitted abstracts relevant to the Major Symposium topic areas.

Please use the list of IMMUNOLOGY2024™ Major Symposium sessions as reference for selecting which session(s) best match the topic of your abstract. Your selection will help the Abstract Programming Chairs and Major Symposium Chairs identify abstracts that are relevant to each session.

Major Symposium titles are listed in alphabetical order and include presentation topics that are of great interest to the Major Symposium Chairs as they consider speakers. This information will also be shared with Abstract Programming Chairs as they review abstracts. If appropriate, more than one session can be selected.

Context is Everything—Extrafollicular B Cell Responses: the Good and the Bad

• germinal center B cells
• extrafollicular B cells
• double negative B cells, DN2 B cells, ABCs
• atypical memory B cells
• memory B cells, effector memory B cells
• long lived plasma cells
• early B cell responses
• B cell regulation

Great Expectations: Immunology of Pregnancy

• fetomaternal tolerance
• allograft tolerance
• maternal-fetal dyad
• prenatal-perinatal infection

Immune Responses to Chronic Viral, Bacterial, Fungal, and Parasitic Infections

• infection
• pathogen
• host-pathogen interactions

Incorporating Time and Space into Multi-omic Systems Immunology Analyses

• combining -omics methods to probe the immune system
• integration of data for full picture of function/ dysfunction
• human or animal models
• “emergent properties” of a system (activities/ functionality that arise from interaction of multiple elements)
• biologic scale of interest ranges from multicellular activities (e.g., within a germinal center) to overall immune response (e.g., response to vaccines, genetic variation)

New Insights into Thymic Selection, Tolerance, and Regeneration

• thymus
• central tolerance
• thymocytes
• T cell development
• thymic selection
• thymic education
• AIRE
• thymic regeneration

Recent Breakthroughs and Emerging Therapeutic Strategies for Chronic Inflammatory and Fibrotic Diseases

• therapeutics
• fibrosis
• inflammation
• autoimmunity
• clinical immunology
• human immunology
• models

Sub-cellular Compartment Signaling in the Regulation of Immune Responses

• metabolic pathways in immune cells
• mitochondria, ER, lipid droplets, lysosomes, etc.
• respiration, oxidative phosphorylation
• metabolites as signaling molecules
• metabolism and epigenetics
• metabolic transport
• metabolic sensing (i.e., mTOR, integrated stress response, SREBP’s)
• metabolic heterogeneity/single-cell metabolism

Unleashing Targets for Novel Cancer Immunotherapies: Beyond T Cell Checkpoints

• myeloid cells
• mRNA vaccines
• novel CAR T cells
• gamma/delta T cells
• antibody responses
• rare populations of T, B, innate lymphocyte, myeloid cells, etc. in immune evasion and modulation of responses to therapies
• implication of Tertiary Lymphoid Structures
• other novel concepts