Professor Sammy Bedoui has a medical degree from the Hannover Medical School in Germany and heads a research laboratory at the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, Australia. Sammy teaches Immunology to undergraduate students and leads an international PhD student exchange program with the University of Bonn in Germany. Sammy has previously held positions at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, the National Institute of Neuroscience in Tokyo and the Hannover Medical School in Germany. Sammy’s research examines how dendritic cells and T cells interact during immune response to infection and cancer, with a particular interest in deciphering how specific innate signals shape these interactions. His research has defined how memory T cells protect the host from bacterial infections through non-cognate functions, uncovering that these responses are regulated through the stimulation of inflammasomes within DC. His work on virus infections has identified how different DC types contribute to the initiation of virus-specific immunity and has delineated how specific viral fragments augment these responses. Ongoing work interrogates the molecular mechanisms by which T cells ‘help’ DC in driving anti-viral immune responses, investigates how microbiota inform appropriate T cell immunity and dissects how different innate sensing pathways orchestrate resistance to bacterial infections.