Australian immunologist wins AAI Lifetime Achievement Award

Professor Jonathan Sprent FAA FRS has been selected by the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) as the 2015 recipient of the AAI Lifetime Achievement Award. A Fellow of the Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Sprent has made many seminal contributions to the fields of immunological memory and tolerance, transplantation immunity and cancer immunotherapy.

Professor Sprent graduated in medicine from The University of Queensland and went on to do a PhD in the lab of pre-eminent immunologist Professor Jacques Miller at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Here, he explored the properties of the newly discovered population of thymus-derived lymphocytes, or T cells. He devised ingenious ways (in mice) of showing how T cells were activated and how they achieved tolerance to ‘self’.

According to his honorary membership profile on the British Society for Immunology website, Professor Sprent’s early studies “elucidated many of the rules which underpin our current understanding of how T cells work. It is testimony to the vision of workers like Jon that the phenomena they defined, and the rules of T-cell recognition they established, have survived almost unchallenged.”

After postdoctoral training in Switzerland and England, Professor Sprent worked for 30 years in the United States, first at the University of Pennsylvania and then at The Scripps Research Institute. He joined the AAI Council in 1993 and become president in 1998.

Professor Sprent returned to Australia in 2005 as a holder of a Burnet Award (of which only three were ever given) and continued to explore his interest in the development, function and fate of T cells. Since 2006 he has led the Cellular Immunity lab at Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, where he works on various aspects of T cell biology.

“I am a great believer in curiosity-driven basic research,” said Professor Sprent. “The Eureka moments we cherish as scientists often arise largely by chance and are vital for pointing us in new directions - in my case, using knowledge of the immune system to devise methods for treating cancer and autoimmune disease.”

According to the AAI, Professor Sprent’s Lifetime Achievement Award recognises “a career of scientific achievement and contributions to AAI and fellow immunologists”. It will be presented at the association’s annual conference, Immunology 2015, to be held from 8-12 May in New Orleans.