UW News

March 8, 1999

Dr. Christopher B. Wilson to head Department of Immunology at the UW School of Medicine

UW Health Sciences/UW Medicine

Dr. Christopher B. “Chris” Wilson has been named chair of the University of Washington (UW) Department of Immunology, effective March 1.

Wilson has been a member of the UW medical faculty since 1979. He is a professor of pediatrics and immunology and former head of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Immunology and Rheumatology at Children’s Hospital in Seattle.

A native of Redlands, Calif., Wilson earned an M.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was a pediatric resident at Children’s Hospital in Boston. He was a clinical fellow in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a fellow in infectious diseases and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Wilson is internationally recognized for his studies on how the immune system develops and the immunological basis for increased risk of infection in early life. He is a member of national scientific advisory groups for such organizations as the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, March of Dimes Foundation, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He recently served on the Maternal and Child Research Committee for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Among his many honors are a Hartford Foundation Fellowship and a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The UW Department of Immunology was formed in 1989. Immunology is the branch of science concerned with how the living body defends itself against disease, and why these mechanisms sometimes go awry.

Wilson succeeds the founding chair of department, Dr. Roger Perlmutter. Dr. Michael Bevan, professor of immunology, was acting chair in the interim.