Prof. Vincenzo Cerullo (Vince), Scientific Founder, is a Professor in Biological Drug Development, Head of the Drug Research Program and a HiLIFE Fellow, Translational Immunology Programme at the University of Helsinki.
Vince gained his PhD at the Centre for Genetic Engineering (CENIGE) at the University of Naples, Federico II in 2004. He then moved to Houston Texas (USA), where he completed a Postdoc at the Baylor College of Medicine. Later, he moved to the University of Helsinki and in 2012 was awarded a tenure-track professorship, opening the ImmunoViroTherapy Lab. IVTLab has raised more than 5 million Euros for research, including the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant, the HiLIFE Fellowship and the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation grant. Vince received the Outstanding Young Investigator award in 2014 from the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, as well as the Excellence in Research Award from the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy in 2015.
One of Vince’s passion is science dissemination. He has been involved from the beginning in the organisation of the Science Track at the Slush conference in Helsinki. Vince pitched on the Slush stage in 2015 and 2016 and on the Slush Y Science stage in 2017 (www.slush.org). Among others, he has presented a TEDx talk on the importance of creativity in science (https://youtu.be/1btbElPnREI ).
