Daniela Latorre is an immunologist at the Institute of Microbiology, ETH Zurich. After obtaining her PhD in Immunology at “Sapienza” University of Rome in Italy, she moved to Switzerland to perform her Postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. Federica Sallusto first at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Bellinzona and later at the ETH Zurich. Since 2019, she has received different research grants, including the prestigious SNSF PRIMA grant, which enabled her to set up the Human Neuroimmunology laboratory at the ETH Zurich, where she holds a Group leader position since January 2020.

Dr. Latorre's research mainly focuses on human immunology, with a primary interest on T cell immunity in the context of immune-mediated neurological diseases and microbial infections. Her main postdoctoral work provided the first solid evidence of the autoimmune basis of narcolepsy, a rare brain disorder (Latorre D et al., Nature, 2018) and opened new perspectives in the field of sleep-related disorders by prompting new studies with major translational implications to the clinics.

More recently, as an independent Group Leader, Dr. Latorre and her team have provided the first description of an autoreactive T cell immunity in a subset of patients affected by Guillain-Barré syndrome, thus making significant progress in the field of inflammatory peripheral neuropathies (Súkeniková and Mallone et al, Nature, 2024). Her research earned her several prizes, including the well-renowned Pfizer Research Prize 2020, the Young Scientist Award 2019 by EU-NN and the Best International Young Researcher on Narcolepsy 2018 by AIN.

Seminar topic: Deciphering autoreactive T cell immunity in human neurological disorders