Professor Thomas Michiels is full professor at UCL, Belgium (teaching general microbiology, molecular biology, and virology) and a group leader at the de Duve Institute of UCL. His group’s research focuses on the interactions between viruses and their host. After revealing the importance of lambda interferon in protecting epithelia against viral infections, his group’s research has recently identified a new virulence mechanism shared by viruses and bacteria.
Thomas Michiels obtained his PhD in Science from the University of Louvain (UCL) in 1988. He then contributed, with Guy Cornélis, to the discovery of the type III secretion system of bacteria (Michiels et al., Inf. Immun. 1990; Michiels et al., J. Bacteriol. 1991). With an EMBO long-term fellowship, he was then introduced to the field of Virology, as a post-doc at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, in the laboratory of Prof. Michel Brahic. There, he started to work on the persistent infection of the central nervous system by Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus (Brahic, Bureau and Michiels, Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2005). In 1993, as a Research Associate of the FNRS, he established his own research group at the de Duve Institute of UCL. The main discoveries made by his team at the de Duve Institute about Theiler’s virus and interferon were:
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