Bali Pulendran, PhD, ITI Director

Violetta L. Horton Professor, Director, Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, Department of Pathology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Fellow at ChEM-H (Chemistry, Engineering and Medicine for Human Health), Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford University.

Dr. Bali Pulendran, Director of the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection (ITI) is professor of pathology, and of microbiology and immunology, at Stanford University School of Medicine. He received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D., from the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, under the supervision of Sir Gustav Nossal. He then did his post-doctoral work at Immunex Corporation in Seattle. Prior to coming to Stanford, Dr. Pulendran was Charles Howard Candler Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine at the Emory Vaccine Center.

Dr. Pulendran has had a transformative impact on human immunology and vaccinology by pioneering the use of systems approaches to probe immunity to vaccination and infection in humans. In addition, Dr. Pulendran discovered that dendritic cells, one of the key cell types orchestrating the immune response, consist of multiple subtypes, which are functionally distinct. He also discovered the mechanisms by which microbial stimuli program DCs to modulate T-helper responses and helped establish Flt3-Ligand as the key growth factor for DCs in vivo. These groundbreaking findings helped define major paradigms in innate immunity and vaccinology.

Dr. Pulendran’s research is published in front line journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Medicine, and Nature Immunology. Dr. Pulendran has served on many advisory boards including that of Keystone Symposia and on the External Immunology Network of GSK. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of several honors and awards, including two concurrent MERIT awards from the NIH, the Albert Levy Prize, the ViE Award for the Best Research Team at the World Vaccine Congress, and  is listed on Thomson Reuter’s list of Highly Cited Researchers, which recognizes the world's most influential researchers of the past decade, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations.