Thread by @VirusesImmunity

I am the luckiest person in the world to have such wonderful trainees who organized the most amazing #IwasakiLabReunion/birthday zoom party yesterday. I am still in awe of how incredibly inspiring it was. Here are a few highlights I want to share with you. (1/)

The event started with a delicious lunch delivered to my door for me and my family, to be followed later by my favorite dinner 🍣and 🎂 🍾 🎁 in the evening 😋 They really know how to spoil me! The entire day was packed with amazing talks, trivia sessions and Prince songs 💜(2/)

So 🙏🏼 to everyone who organized this incredible reunion and thoughtful presents - @maria_tokuyama @MelissaLV14 Kris Sepanek @jofrank1088 @JeffGehlhausen @Myoungjoo @peowenlu @carolilucas @aliceluculligan @tianyangmao @annsea_park @marioph13 @taka_takehiro @YYexin Pat Wong (3/)

The talented @YYexin drew this beautiful picture with my quote, “To be successful in anything, you have to enjoy it and enjoy yourself while doing it.” (4/)

What I found to be a common thread in all the amazing talks is that everyone is so resilient in their pursuit of their scientific quest. In their own respective labs, they found answers to long standing questions they began asking while they were still trainees. (5/)

For example, @EllenFoxman took 10 years to find the right experimental system to solve her question, “what is the basis of viral interference?” in this awesome study just published 👇🏽 (6/)

thelancet.com/journals/lanmi…

.@YosukeKumamoto took enormous effort to generate mouse models that allow conditional deletion of genes in his favorite dendritic cell type (CD301b+ DC2) to solve an inexplicable observation he made 7 years ago in this fantastic study👇🏽(7/)

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Just before leaving my lab to join Irv Weissman’s lab, @ImmunoFever told me how excited she was to test her hypothesis that CD47 (don’t eat me signal) may be induced on infected cells to regulate immunity. She published a paper showing just that! (8/)

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32576678/

In 2012, @HShin_Lab observed that Prime and Pull reduced disease without affecting viral load in the vaginal mucosa after HSV-2 infection👇🏽 In her own lab, she figured out how disease is dissociated from viral load. Stay tuned for her publication. (9/)

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23075848/

Carrying the torch to @fredhutch, @JennyLund15 continues to uncover new roles of #Tregs in immunity to genital herpes infection. Xinyan Zhao is now a president & CEO of Adept Therapeutics focused on cancer immunotherapy. Norifumi Iijima uncovering how adjuvant works. (10/)

Our current trainees gave fabulous talks, too! @weizmano on his new discovery of innate immune control of metastasis (pub in preparation), and @ericsongg on his study on neuron infection by #SARS_CoV_2 (11/)

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

A surprise video of my dear friends, colleagues and role models giving birthday wishes to me. OMG 🤩😭 it made me soooo happy! I will cherish this forever… Thank you all 🙏🏼 (12/)

During the reception, we discussed the problems of toxicity and discrimination in academia. My dream would be to make changes so that everyone is given a safe environment to excel in science. As @aliceluculligan points out, science isn’t a zero-sum game! (13/)

The most gratifying revelation of #IwasakiLabReunion was that my former trainees, wherever they are in whatever profession, are spreading #kindness & #generosity to their own mentees. If I had anything to do with it, this is by far the greatest contribution of my career 🙏🏼 (End)

Oops how can I forget to mention Will Khoury-Hanold! Thank you Will!