Spotlight: The 2026 AAI ASPIRE Awardees

At IMMUNOLOGY2026™, AAI will recognize the six ASPIRE awardees for this year at the Business Meeting on Friday, April 17, at 10:15 AM. This award encourages and fosters the development of talented early-career AAI member scientists to continue advancing their research activities and scientific contributions in the field of immunology.

The 2026 ASPIRE awardees will present lectures at special symposia on April 16, 17, and 18. They will be joined by two of last year’s awardees who were unable to attend the annual meeting in 2025. View the slideshow below to learn more about the new awardees and their presentations:

David A. Braun, M.D., Ph.D. (AAI '25)
Yale University
I am tremendously honored and grateful to receive the AAI Award in recognition of our laboratory’s contribution to understanding the determinants of anti-tumor immunity in patients. Our work is collaborative in nature, starting with the generous participation of patients themselves, and including a large group of scientists and clinicians. This Award is a recognition of everyone’s hard work and meaningful contributions to the shared goal of ultimately improving cancer immunotherapies for patients.

David A. Braun, MD, PhD, will present his lecture, “Determinants and augmentation of effective anti-tumor immunity in kidney cancer.” at the AAI ASPIRE Awards Symposium, Saturday, April 18, at 8:00 AM.

Camila H. Coelho, Ph.D. (AAI '22)
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Receiving the ASPIRE Award from the American Association of Immunologists truly means a lot to me and to my team. It feels like a recognition of the hard work, persistence, and passion we bring every day as we build our research program, and it motivates us to keep asking bold questions about human B cell responses to emerging pathogens and how we can translate our findings into better vaccines and therapies.

Camila H. Coelho will present her lecture, “Discovery and targeting of human B cell epitopes to counter emerging threats,” at the AAI ASPIRE Awards Symposium, Friday, April 17, at 8:00 AM.

Alex Gitlin, M.D., Ph.D. (AAI '23)
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
I am thrilled and honored to receive the AAI ASPIRE Award. This prize recognizes the challenging work and accomplishments of our collaborative research team and provides an exciting platform to showcase our work to the broader immunology community.

Alex Gitlin, MD, PhD, will present his lecture, “Insights into VEXAS syndrome: How the cell death machinery unleashes inflammation,” at the AAI ASPIRE Awards Symposium, Saturday, April 18, at 8:00 AM.

Tobias V. Lanz, M.D. (AAI '23)
Stanford University
I am deeply grateful to receive the AAI ASPIRE Award, which honors and fuels my commitment to advancing our understanding of the adaptive immune response in autoimmune and neuroimmunological diseases. This recognition further strengthens my resolve to pursue the big questions in the field, and it will serve as a source of inspiration and momentum for my team. I am excited to be part of a vibrant community of immunologists, and together forge ahead with innovative research that pushes the boundaries of immunological research and ultimately improves human health.

Tobias Lanz, MD, will present his lecture, “The link between Epstein-Barr virus and multiple sclerosis – molecular mimicry and beyond,” at the AAI ASPIRE Awards Symposium, Thursday, April 16, at 8:00 AM.

Sadiya Parveen Nesson, Ph.D. (AAI '24)
Louisiana State University Health Shreveport
As a young investigator, receiving the ASPIRE Award from AAI is both an honor and a testament to the importance of the role of host immunometabolism in shaping the outcome of infectious diseases. Most importantly, this award also reflects the dedication of my team at LSU Health Shreveport as we work to deepen our understanding of the immune system and lay the foundation for new host directed therapies to improve human health.

Sadiya Parveen-Nesson, PhD, will present her lecture, “Harnessing the ghosts of influenza past to generate protective humoral immunity” at the AAI ASPIRE Awards Symposium, Friday, April 17, at 8:00 AM.

Michael Wheeler, Ph.D. (AAI '23)
Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women's Hospital
Receiving the ASPIRE Award is a deeply meaningful recognition for our lab's work, but also for the growing importance of neuroimmunology as a field. To me, it reflects immunology's remarkable willingness to continually expand its boundaries, embracing the nervous system as a central player in immune-mediated disease and, equally, recognizing immunity as a fundamental regulator of brain function and behavior. At a time when neuroimmune interactions are revealing new biology across brain diseases, cancer, and tissue inflammation, this award feels like a signal that the broader immunology community sees this frontier as its own, and that excites me enormously about what's ahead for the field.

Michael Wheeler, PhD, will present his lecture, “Peripheral immune signatures that orchestrate complex behavior,” at the AAI ASPIRE Awards Symposium, Thursday, April 16, at 8:00 AM.

From the class of 2025 ASPIRE Awardees, Anna-Maria Globig, MD, will present her lecture, “Sympathetic nerves regulate T cell differentiation in viral infection and cancer on Thursday, April 16, and Brandon J. DeKosky, PhD, will present his lecture, “Scalable platforms to study and engineer immune receptors,” on Friday, April 17.

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