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 AIDS Research Institute and as the scientific director of the Catalan HIV vaccine program HIVACAT. He is a co-inventor of the "HTI" immunogen, which has shown first promising results in clinical phase II trials of therapeutic HIV vaccination. He serves as a curator of the Los Alamos HIV Database and is an 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 virus control and to explore the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate such control. We combine immune assays with methylome, 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.