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Friday July 04, 2025

Congratulations to Oanh Nguyen
 

We warmly congratulate
Oanh Nguyen
winner of the Jared Purton Award

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I am a Senior Research Fellow in Professor Katherine Kedzierska’s Laboratory, in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Melbourne. We are located within the Doherty Institute.

In 2023, I was awarded the ASI Jared Purton Award to attend the 2024 3rd CEIRR Annual Network Meeting, which happened on 21st-24th of July this year in New York City. The Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response (CEIRR) Annual Network Meeting Conferences includes an elite global network of research scientists, public health and clinical experts, government representatives, wildlife biologists and veterinarians to meet and discuss the latest scientific advances on influenza virus infection in humans and animals. The CEIRR network is supported by the Influenza Program at the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (NIH/NIAID/DMID). It consists of 7 major CEIRR Centres and was created to provide an international research network to study influenza and combat influenza outbreaks. The inaugural meeting was held in Memphis in 2022, hosted by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital CEIRR Centre. The second meeting was held last year in Baltimore, hosted by Johns Hopkins University CEIRR Centre.

This year’s CEIRR’s conference was hosted by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (CRIPT) CEIRR Centre and held at the New York Academy of Medicine, situated on Fifth Avenue on the side of Central Park. The presentations were held in the Hosack Hall Auditorium, which was so beautiful with musical theatre-like velvet chairs and chandeliers. The conference had over 50 speakers and 200 posters showcasing unpublished work. There were team-building exercises such as trivia, scavenger hunt surveys and baseball card collecting across the 3-day program to increase the networking opportunities for graduate researchers and junior postdocs. The networking dinner was at Tavern on the Green, which was a spectacular venue situated within Central Park.

 

The influenza conference program included sessions devoted to virus and host factors, virus evolution, infection and immunity in high-risk populations, viral dynamics, influenza surveillance and emerging pathogens. I thoroughly enjoyed presentations from Rafeel Medina, Ron Fouchier and Adolfo Garcia-Sastre speaking on viral and host factors. Scott Boyd, Caroline Kikawa, Louise Moncla and Amy Baker gave fantastic talks on virus evolution and replication, and Paul Thomas, a long-standing collaborator of ours gave a very nice presentation on stromal cell regulation of tissue immunity. The poster sessions were split across two evenings. My highlight was a poster on long COVID T cells from Mark Painter, a postdoc in John Wherry’s Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia. My presentation on the morning of Day 2 provided an update on our clinical studies investigating determinants of severe disease in indigenous populations who are at higher risk of severe influenza disease. My presentation was warmly received.

Overall, it was a great scientific conference with over 300 attendees and was such a pleasant and summery experience in Manhattan. Next years’ meeting will be another exciting event for the calendar. Finally, I would like to thank the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology Inc. for the Jared Purton Award to support my travel to this conference. I believe last year was the last of the Jared Purton Award and I feel very privileged to have received one in my scientific career.

Author: Oanh Nguyen

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ASI