These awards are presented every year by the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research (ISICR) at the society’s annual meeting. They are bestowed on a maximum of five people who have made significant contributions to research on interferon and cytokine, and who have been awarded a PhD or an MD within the previous eight years.

Dr Hamming’s research in the innate immune system focuses on finding ways to use structural information to answer questions about the function and signalling of cytokines. Cytokines are signalling proteins with high physiological significance for reproduction and growth, as well as being regulators of the immune system.

The ISICR awarded Dr Hamming the prize for his efforts to unravel how the antiviral cytokine interferon lambda affects the body’s cells. He has also helped to determine the evolutionary relationship between the interferon system in fish and humans. His work on the crystal structure of cytokine IL-21 bound to the extracellular domain of its receptor IL-21R was also mentioned as an important factor for making the award. This structure showed that a sugar chain is an integral part of the protein structure of IL-21R.

Ole Jensen Hamming completed his PhD degree in January 2011 in the laboratory of Associate Professor Rune Hartmann, Department of Molecular Biology (now the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics) at Aarhus University. He is now employed as a postdoctoral fellow in the same laboratory.

More about The Milstein Young Investigator Award

More about The ISICR

More information

Postdoctoral Fellow Ole Jensen Hamming
Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics
Aarhus University, Denmark
ojh@mb.au.dk, +45 2620 3159

Text and translation: Lisbeth Heilesen