Press Release - April 21, 2004
Contact:
Pamela McDonnell
Office of Public Affairs
NYU School of Medicine
Tel: 212-404-3555
E-mail: Pamela.McDonnell@med.nyu.edu
NYU School of Medicine Scientist Is Elected a Member of the National Academy
of Sciences
April 21, 2004, New York - Dan R. Littman, M.D., Ph.D., the Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Professor of Molecular Immunology at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University School of Medicine and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Littman was among 72 scientists in the United States and 18 foreign associates from 13 countries who were elected this week to the NAS in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, according to an announcement by the NAS. Election to the NAS is widely considered one of the highest accolades that can be accorded to a scientist or engineer.
Dr. Littman’s laboratory is devoted to understanding how the human immune system develops the capacity to fight off infection and cancer. Dr. Littman is also investigating how HIV, the virus causing AIDS, evades a strong response by the immune system, thus allowing the virus to multiply and to persist in the body. By understanding how immune responses are elicited by infectious agents, and the mechanisms that microorganisms employ to evade such responses, Dr. Littman hopes to devise better strategies for developing vaccines and anti-microbial therapies.
His laboratory has identified and studied molecules on the surface of immune system cells that allow HIV to enter these cells. One of these molecules, called CD4, is present on a type of immune system cell called helper T cells, which are central in orchestrating immune responses against microbes. Dr. Littman’s research has elucidated many functions of CD4 molecule, including the role it plays in activating the helper T cell when it encounters a foreign antigen.
Dr. Littman received his undergraduate degree at Princeton
University and completed the M.D./Ph.D. program at Washington
University of St. Louis, where he worked with Benjamin Schwartz
and Susan Cullen on the function of histocompatibility molecules
in antigen presentation, a key feature of the immune system response
to foreign invaders. He did his postdoctoral work in the laboratory
of Richard Axel at Columbia University, where he isolated the
genes for CD4 and CD8, another immune signaling molecule. Dr.
Littman was Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at University
of California, San Francisco, before joining New York University
School of Medicine in 1995.