António Coutinho

António Coutinho (MD, Lisbon Medical School 1970/PhD, Karolinska Institute 1974) has directed groups, departments and institutions in Sweden, Switzerland, France and Portugal, in public and private (profit and non-profit) research organizations, having held appointments in several European Universities, and visiting professorships in the USA and Brazil. He serves or has served in many scientific advisory boards in Europe, America and Asia, as well as in scientific societies and journals. From 1998 to 2012, he reformed and directed the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, where he had launched the first PhD Program in Portugal (1993). António Coutinho has worked on lymphocyte activation and cell cooperation, selection of immune repertoires, autoimmunity and tolerance. His early work in the 1970's (at the Karolinska Institute and at the Basel Institute of Immunology) provided the first demonstration for a germ-line encoded activation receptor for lipopolysaccharide, and for a family of "mitogen receptors" to bacterial ligands; at the Umea University Medical School and at the Pasteur Institute in the 1980's, he contributed ample evidence for the "physiology of auto-reactivity", demonstrating the positive selection of auto-antibodies to the "natural antibody" pool, particularly early in post-natal development; with Francisco Varela, he produced pioneering views on the dynamics and meta-dynamics of networks; by in the 1990's, his work with Nicole Le Douarin provided one of the first sets of evidence for “dominant tolerance” and for the critical role of "regulatory" CD4 T cells, selected on thymic epithelium, in the establishment and maintenance of natural tolerance to body tissues.