Phillippa Marrack, Ph.D.

Dr. Marrack, an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute also holds the Chair of Biomedical Research at National Jewish Health where she has had a research laboratory for 35 years. Working closely with her husband John Kappler, Ph.D, she has devoted her career to understanding T cells, which recognize foreign invaders in the body and orchestrate the specific immune response that defends the body from disease. Among the team’s most noteworthy discoveries is unraveling the process that allows effective T cells to mature, while destroying dangerous T cells. They discovered the T-cell receptor, which recognizes specific pathogens and orchestrates a focused attack against them.

Born in England, Dr. Marrack earned her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at Cambridge University, England. She came to the United States to conduct postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Diego, and went on to establish a joint laboratory with her husband at the University of Rochester before joining the National Jewish Health and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in 1979.

Dr. Marrack has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the National Institute of Medicine), the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association of Immunology. She has won the British Royal Society’s Wellcome Foundation Prize, The Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstadter Prize from the Paul Ehrlich Foundation in Germany, the Pearl Meister Greengard Price, the International L”OREAL-UNESCO for Women in Science Award. Dr. Marrack also received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award and the prestigious Wolf Prize in Medicine.

Dr. Marrack is former president of the American Association of Immunologists, and the International Union of Immunological Societies. She has served on various panels and boards for the American Cancer Society, the National Institutes of Health, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.