Charles University Second Faculty of Medicine

PhD in Immunology

Immunology is a dynamically evolving discipline integrating the knowledge of molecular and cell biology, physiology, histology, and functional morphology (in the context of evolution and ontogenesis) relevant to the immune system, a self-defense unit composed of functionally interacting molecules, cells, and tissues involved in immune responses. Immunology outputs show a major impact in a multitude of biomedical fields today. Topics such as transplantation, allergy, immune deficiency, autoimmunity, immunosuppression, immunotherapy, or anti-tumor immunity are typical areas of interest to immunologists. Immunology covers all levels of biological knowledge from molecules (cytokines, immunoglobulins, receptors, signaling molecules), cells (a wide array of immunocompetent cells), whole organisms (having transgenic animal models in use and interaction with the immune system is being investigated), and communities (evolution of immune mechanisms, e.g. frequencies of different alleles regulating the immune response within a population). Clinical immunology is an important emancipated immunology specialization, for which the human immune system is the object of studies, and understanding the mechanism of its action leads to the development of potential therapeutic applications.

Typically, a four-year postgraduate's study of immunology deepens the master's education having more specialized lectures and mainly by intensive scientific education by the supervisor. Courses and lectures are provided by specialists from the Faculty of Science and Faculties of Medicine of Charles University and, to a great extent, experts from the institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (mainly IMG and IM). Students are conducting doctoral theses, in these institutions mainly, but also in hospitals, clinical laboratories, or private companies - biotechnology development centers. Students are repeatedly reporting the progress of their doctoral theses at conferences, as of a poster or an oral presentation. For their projects, students can receive support through various grant calls. They learn about the international dimension of scientific cooperation in foreign laboratories. The output of scientific activities associated with the elaboration of doctoral theses is numerous posters and presentations at international conferences and publications in international impacted journals. The key activity of the Immunology program guarantor, as well as the immunologists at the Faculty of Science, is student project supervision, stimulation of their independent experimental work, and critical evaluation of the primary literature. In order to achieve that, we provide the course Advances in Immunology (in English).

The program is carried out without any specialization.