Christian Brander obtained a PhD in Immunology at the University of Bern and completed his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, focusing on T cell immunity to HIV. He led several international efforts to build HIV research capacities across Southern Africa and Central and South America. He joined ICREA in 2008 with an appointment at the IrsiCaixa Research Institute and as the scientific director of the Catalan HIV vaccine program HIVACAT. He is a co-inventor of the "HTI" immunogen, co-founder of AELIX Therapeutics and curator of the Los Alamos HIV Database. He serves on the SAB of the South African Brilliant Consortium and the IDORI Research Institute as well as the EDCTP-funded GREAT Consortium. He holds an appointment as Associate Professor at the University of Vic.

Our group aims to understand the cellular immunity to viral infections in different disease contexts. Using complementary tools for immune analysis and integrated -omics approaches, we seek to identify functional correlates of effective antiviral immunity and to explore the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate such virus control. We combine immune assays with epigenetics, communicome and transcriptomics analyses to assess to what degree and at which stages of different viral infections the effector function profiles of virus-specific T cells are epigenetically controlled. We are especially interested in understanding these mechanisms in lympho-proliverative and neurological diseases driven by these viral infections and pay special attention to TCR repertoires of the involved T cells and their antigen specificities.