Bendelac, an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, studies natural killer T cells, a component of the immune system that recognizes fatty substances known as lipids, rather than proteins.
Bendelac and his colleagues have been instrumental in identifying the substances that activate NKT cells and showing that NKT cells, and the lipids they recognize, have specialized functions in the immune system. Learning how to manipulate these immune cells could lead to better therapies for cancer and other diseases.
Bendelac received his M.D. and Ph.D. in immunology from University of Paris and completed his residency at the Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris. After a fellowship in clinical immunology at the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale, he came to the United States in 1988 as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. From 1994 to 2002, he was a member of the molecular biology faculty at Princeton University. He came to Chicago in 2002 as a Professor in Pathology, served as chairman of the committee on Immunology from 2003 to 2007, and was named a Hughes Investigator in 2005. (The University of Chicago Chronicle, January 2008).

Harinder Singh, Chicago's Louis Block professor of molecular genetics and cell biology, has developed an approach that models the cell-fate mechanism as a circuit, much as an engineer design an electrical circuit. But where an electrical circuit might map how a light is turned on or off, Singh's circuit maps how genetic triggers turn on gene sets that determine whether a cell becomes a macrophage or neutrophil. Described in an August 2006 Cell, Singh's first cell-fate circuit holds broad promise, he says, that could help create entirely new cell types for therapeutic purposes.
The circuit--a mathematical model of the cell-fate mechanism--was developed using data from an elaborate experimental system. "In biology, generally speaking, people are experimentalists," says Singh, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "We need to better integrate theoretical analysis with the traditional experimental analysis we've been doing in the past." (The University of Chicago Magazine, July-August 2007).