Gérard Eberl

Institut Pasteur

Website

Title

Impact of acute and chronic inflammation on brain and metabolism

Abstract

The immune system and the nervous system express a large and overlapping set of receptors to sense the milieu intérieur and the environment. The two systems interact at many levels to balance the energy budget and regulate each other. I will show you how the microbiota provides information to the brain to manage the energy budget et adapt behavior in the face of potential danger, and how the brain senses the environment to regulate immune responses.

Biosketch

Gérard Eberl completed his PhD at the University of Lausanne on the structure of epitopes recognized by T cells, followed by a first post-doctoral fellowship at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, also in Lausanne, on the development and function of invariant NKT cells. A second post-doctorate in New York led him to characterize the role of the nuclear hormone receptor RORgt in innate lymphoid cells (ILC). In 2005, Gérard was recruited to the Institut Pasteur in Paris to lead the Lymphoid Tissue Development Unit, which became the Microenvironment & Immunity Unit in 2015. For 10 years now, his laboratory has been studying the impact of symbiotic microbiota on the development and activity of the immune system, mainly in the gut, but also at more distant sites, such as adipose tissue and the lung. More recently, he has been interested in understanding how the microbiota also influences mouse behavior through activation of the innate immune system, and how the nervous system modulates immune responses. From 2015 to 2019, Gerard was the director of the immunology department at the Institut Pasteur.