Professor Greta Guarda appointed President of the Swiss Society of Allergology and Immunology

Professor Greta Guarda, Director of the Laboratory of Immune System Mechanisms at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) affiliated with USI, and Full Professor at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, has been elected President of the Swiss Society of Allergology and Immunology (SSAI) until 2027.

The handover of the presidency took place in Lausanne on 27-28 August during the society's annual congress. Professor Greta Guarda succeeds Dr Med. Professor Camillo Ribi, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne and active in the Department of Immunology and Allergology at CHUV, who chaired the SSAI between 2023 and 2025.

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After studying molecular biology at the University of Zurich and graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Greta Guarda completed her doctorate at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Bellinzona, studying T-cell-mediated immunity. In 2007, she continued as a post-doc at the University of Lausanne, where she founded her own research group in 2012 thanks to a professorship from the Swiss National Science Foundation and a European Starting Grant. In 2018, she returned to the IRB as laboratory director and is a full professor at USI, where she has been Vice Dean for Research since 2021.

With her research team, she studies new mechanisms that regulate antigen presentation, which is a key signal for activating the immune response against infections and cancer. However, the effectiveness of the immune response is not regulated exclusively by antigen presentation but also by factors that intrinsically control immune cells. For this reason, Greta Guarda's research group also studies certain factors that are important for the function and/or "well-being" of immune system cells in the context of the immune response against cancer and autoimmunity.