The Immune Alliance - a German-Japanese Cooperation in Immunology Bilateral Cooperation

Hideki Ueno is a human immunologist with more than 25 years of experience in basic and clinical immunology. He received his M.D. from the Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, in 1992, and his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, in 2001. He then joined the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research in Dallas, TX, USA, where he progressed from postdoctoral fellow to Full Investigator and conducted research in several areas of human immunology, including human dendritic-cell subsets and T follicular helper cells. In 2016, he became a professor at the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute and the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, NY, USA.

He joined Kyoto University as a professor of immunology in 2019 while maintaining a cross-appointment with Mount Sinai, which he concluded in April 2021. Since April 2021, he has served as a full-time professor at Kyoto University.
Dr. Ueno’s current research focuses on human T cell subsets and various immune cell populations in the liver, as well as translational research on human infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. His major contributions include defining the functional differences among human skin dendritic-cell subsets, discovering and characterizing human T follicular helper-cell subsets, elucidating their roles in autoimmune disease and antibody production, and establishing the differentiation pathways of human T follicular helper cells.

Katrin Kierdorf is a W3 Professor at the University of Freiburg and leads a research group at the Institute for Infection Prevention and Control. Her research group focuses on the ontogeny, tissue adaptation and functional specialization of tissue-resident macrophages. Her work has contributed to understanding the developmental origins of macrophages, the mechanisms governing their colonization of tissues, and the role of local niche signals in shaping their identity and adaptation during disease, with a particular focus on microglia in the CNS. In parallel, she has extensive expertise in Drosophila immunology, where her research has uncovered roles for Drosophila macrophages as interorgan signaling hubs regulating systemic energy homeostasis, metabolic adaptation and immune activation. By combining Drosophila and mouse models, her research bridges macrophage development, network assembly and adaptation during disease. In 2025, she was accepted into the DFG Heisenberg Program.