Symposium for immunology meeting honors legacy of Donald Pious

A day-long symposium honoring the life and work of Dr. Donald Pious will be held at the UW Wednesday, May 17, immediately following the joint meeting of the American Association of Immunologists and Clinical Immunology Society in Seattle May 12 to 16. The UW symposium, co-sponsored by the School of Medicine’s departments of immunology and pediatrics, is titled “Class II Antigen Presentation from Bench to Bedside: The Legacy of Donald Pious.”

The late Donald Pious in a 1994 photo.

Pious, a member of the School of Medicine faculty for 38 years until his death in September 1998 at the age of 68, was a professor of both pediatrics and immunology. He also held an adjunct appointment in genetics.

After attending college and medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and training in pediatrics at Yale University, Pious went on to become a prolific basic science researcher in histocompatibility and immunogenetics. He was noted for his work on antigen processing and presentation, for his studies of HLA (human leukocyte antigen) variants, the identification of the HLA-DM molecule and its role in antigen presentation, and for the molecular biology techniques and genetic approaches he used in these analyses. He received a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health for his work.

The symposium will begin at 9 a.m. in room 316 of the South Campus Center. Morning session speakers are Peter Cresswell of Yale University, Jeremy Boss of Emory University, Jenny Ting of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Elizabeth Mellins of Stanford University.

Beginning at 1:30 p.m., afternoon speakers are Alexander Rudensky of the UW and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Gerald Nepon of Virginia Mason Research Center and a UW affiliate faculty member, Roger Perlmutter of Merck Research Labs and former chair of immunology at the UW, and Hugh McDevitt of Stanford.

The Donald Pious Pediatric Research Laboratory will be dedicated from 11:55 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. at the symposium. Tours of the lab facility, on the 5th floor of the Health Science Center’s RR wing (rooms RR-535 and 537), will be offered immediately after the dedication.

The laboratory dedication is open to everyone. Members of the UW community are welcome to attend sessions of the symposium, but are asked to contact Barbara Lovseth, symposium coordinator, at 685-3956 or barblov@u.washington.edu, to register or for a full program of presentations.