Michael Ratcliffe
University of Toronto
Canada
Dr. Ratcliffe received his Honours B.Sc from the University of Glasgow and Ph.D. from University College London in 1980 before joining the prestigious Basel Institute for Immunology, Europe’s leading center for Immunology at the time. Dr. Ratcliffe subsequently returned to London, England as a Senior Fellow of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund.
Recruited to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of McGill University in 1986, Dr. Ratcliffe then joined the University of Toronto as Professor and Chair of the Department of Immunology, Canada’s largest and most prestigious Immunology Department. In 2012, Dr. Ratcliffe was appointed Dean and Vice-Provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto.
Dr. Ratcliffe is a former President of the Canadian Society for Immunology and the Canadian Foundation of Biomedical Societies. He is currently IUIS Treasurer.
Dr. Ratcliffe’s research focuses on lymphocyte development. Using the chicken embryo as a model, Dr. Ratcliffe has made a major contribution to our understanding of how B lymphocytes develop and how the normal repertoire of antibody specificities is generated. An expert in the evolution of lymphocyte development, Dr. Ratcliffe has published more than one hundred papers in international journals and is Editor-in-Chief of the recently published Encyclopedia of Immunobiology.