Oral History Project: Rafi Ahmed, PhD, FRS-Interview with Rafi Ahmed, Ph.D., F.R.S.

Video Transcription

Video Summary

Dr. Rafi Ahmed, Director of the Emory Vaccine Center and an AAI Excellence in Mentoring Award recipient (2015), recounts his path from Hyderabad, India—where he studied chemistry/biology—to the United States in 1970. After additional undergraduate training in microbiology at Idaho State University, he worked at McGill University, gaining his first intensive lab experience, then earned a PhD at Harvard as a virologist under Bernie Fields. A postdoc with Michael Oldstone at Scripps introduced him to immune responses to viral infection, leading to a faculty career at UCLA where he shifted from pathogen-centered virology to fundamental immunology, especially immunological memory.<br /><br />Recruited to Emory in the mid-1990s to help build an academic vaccine center, Ahmed’s lab made key discoveries on long-lived plasma cells and antigen-independent persistence and self-renewal of memory CD8 T cells. His group helped define “T-cell exhaustion” in chronic infection and linked it to the inhibitory receptor PD-1, demonstrating that PD-1 pathway blockade can restore T-cell function—work foundational to modern cancer immunotherapy. He emphasizes mentoring through close, collaborative scientific engagement and treating trainees as equals. He also discusses global growth in immunology, the importance of balanced research funding, and Emory’s vaccine center model integrating basic science, targeted vaccine programs, clinical trials, and policy.

Asset Caption

Rafi Ahmed is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University, Vaccine Center Director at the Emory Vaccine Center, Eminent Scholar of the Georgia Research Alliance, and Investigator at the Emory Center for AIDS Research. Dr. Ahmed was awarded the AAI Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2015 and elected a Distinguished Fellow of AAI in 2020.

Keywords

Rafi Ahmed

Emory Vaccine Center

immunological memory

long-lived plasma cells

memory CD8 T cells

T-cell exhaustion

PD-1 blockade

cancer immunotherapy

scientific mentoring