Richard A. Flavell, chair of the Department of Immunobiology, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has been elected the first president of the newly formed International Cytokine and Interferon Society (ICIS). He will take office in 2014 and serve through 2015.
The ICIS is a non-profit organization of more than 600 scientists who study interferon, cytokine and chemokine cell biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and the clinical use of these biological response modifiers. The society was formed this year through the merger of two existing organizations, the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research (ISICR), and the International Cytokine Society. “These organizations have come to study very similar things and it was felt that they had more in common than they did not, and therefore the merger made the most sense,” said Flavell, who received the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science from the ISICR in 2013.
The new society will host its first annual meeting in San Francisco in September. Current officers and committees will remain in place until new leadership takes office in 2014.