Elena Tomasello was born in Acqui Terme, Italy. All along her career, she has been interested in innate immunity. She obtained her PhD in 1998 in Genoa, Italy, in Pr. Lorenzo Moretta, where she characterized new molecules involved in the regulation of the activation of human Natural Killer (NK) cells.

After her PhD defense, she moved into the team of Pr. Eric Vivier at the Center of Immunology of Marseille-Luminy (CIML), Marseille, France. During her post-doctoral training she engineered and characterized a novel knock-in mouse model targeting the adapter molecule DAP12, a key ITAM-bearing polypeptide required for the signalling of activating receptors expressed by NK cells and several myeloid cells, including dendritic cells (DC).

Since 2001 she is a tenure CNRS researcher at the CIML. Until 2011, she developed in Eric Vivier’a team a new research group aiming at studying the NK cells in the gut at steady state and in response to Listeria monocytogenes infection, which led her to discover a new population of the innate immune system: the type 3 Innate Lymphoid Cells, and to contribute characterizing their molecular make-up and their functions in both mice and humans.

In 2012, she joined Marc Dalod’s team, still at the CIML. There, she developed a new research program focusing on the dissection of the molecular mechanisms regulating the functions of plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDC), especially during viral infections. Recently, her group revealed unexpected dynamics and functions of pDC during viral infections, by using new mouse models specifically tracing or depleting these cells. In particular, she showed that pDC and their interferons are dispensable in systemic mouse cytomegalovirus and detrimental in respiratory influenza infections. She is currently investigating the underpinning mechanisms of these deleterious functions and the molecular mechanisms regulating functional heterogeneity of pDC within tissues.