Susan Kaech

Susan Kaech is a professor and director of the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis (NCIMP) at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. She holds the NOMIS Foundation Chair. Kaech is internationally recognized for her efforts to understand how memory T cells are produced during infection and vaccination, how they function and why they can fail to induce long-term immunity during immunization. She and her team have discovered more than half a dozen important regulatory genes, as well as several types of key molecules called cytokines. In addition, Kaech is interested in how T cell behavior is suppressed by tumors; she seeks to use this information in order to create better therapies for cancer using the body’s own immune system—an innovative and rapidly moving field called cancer immunotherapy.