Daniela Latorre
Daniela Latorre is Head of the Neuro-Immune Interactions Unit at San Raffaele Hospital and Associate Professor at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. She obtained her PhD in Immunology from Sapienza University of Rome and completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. Federica Sallusto, first at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona and later at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
In 2020, Dr. Latorre was awarded the PRIMA Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, which enabled her to establish and lead the Human Neuroimmunology Group at ETH Zurich. In 2025, she received competitive national and international funding, including the Armenise–Harvard Foundation Career Development Award, the ERC Consolidator Grant and the Italian Consolidator Grant and subsequently founded her new research group at San Raffaele Hospital.
Dr. Latorre’s research is focused on Neuroimmunology, investigating autoreactive immune cell responses in human neurological diseases. She combines in-depth immune phenotyping, antigen-specific single-cell screening, and immune receptor sequencing to define the specificity, clonal composition, and functional states of autoreactive T cells in biological samples from patients with immune-mediated neurological disorders and controls. Her work provided the first conclusive evidence of the autoimmune origin of narcolepsy, a sleep-related brain disorder (Nature, 2018), and more recently identified key immune mechanisms underlying Guillain–Barré syndrome, an inflammatory peripheral neuropathy (Nature, 2024), redefining our understanding of these diseases and paving the way for novel biomedical applications.
Dr. Latorre has received several honors, including the Pfizer Research Prize (2020), the EU-NN Young Scientist Award (2019), and the AIN Award for Best International Young Researcher on Narcolepsy (2018). She is also recognized as a mentor and scientific leader, having founded and served as president of the Swiss Young Immunologists Society, and actively participates in mentorship programs, career development workshops, and science outreach initiatives.