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Dr. Max Cooper is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Immunology, member of the Emory Vaccine Center, and Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine in the Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Cooper is recognized for his research on lymphocyte development and function in healthy and immunocompromised individuals. With Robert Good at the University of Minnesota, he delineated the developmentally separate, but functionally intertwined T and B cell arms of the adaptive immune system. With Paul Kincade at the University of Alabama, he showed that IgM-bearing lymphocytes give rise to B cells that switch to the production of other Ig isotypes. Dr. Cooper worked with John Owen and Martin Raff at University College London to determine the hematopoietic tissue origin of B cells and to identify B cell precursors. Dale Bockman and Cooper described the specialized transcytotic epithelial “M” cells in mammalian Peyer’s patches and appendix and the avian bursa of Fabricius. Dr. Cooper worked with Zeev Pancer and Jan Klein to define an alternative adaptive immune system in jawless vertebrates that uses leucine-rich-repeat gene segments instead of Ig gene segments to generate a clonally diverse repertoire of antigen receptors on T-like and B-like lymphocytes. He has authored more than 650 peer-reviewed papers, and book chapters and reviews. He has served or serving as an Associate Editor and member of the editorial board of many prestigious immunology and cell biology journals.
Dr. Cooper is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and has received numerous awards; most notables are the 3M Life Science Award, Sandoz Prize in Immunology, American College of Physicians Science Award, American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award, Avery-Landsteiner Prize, and the Robert-Koch-Stiftung Award for New Fundamental Research and Discoveries in the Field of Immunology.