Current role and affiliations
Marta Schips has been a member of the K.G Jebsen Centre for Young Medical Researchers since 2026, and is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Laboratory of Immunoregulation and T Cell Biology at the University of Oslo. She is a computational immunologist with a PhD in Life Sciences from Technische Universität Braunschweig and an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Milan. She conducted her doctoral research at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Researcher in the H2020 COSMIC network. Before joining UiO, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Systems Immunology Department at HZI.
Research interests and focus
Dr. Schips is interested in the mechanisms that coordinate and regulate immune responses. She uses mechanistic computational models informed by experimental data to investigate how cellular interactions and local regulatory processes give rise to collective behaviour in immune cell populations.
Her current research focuses on germinal-centre biology, particularly follicular T-cell dynamics and their role in B-cell selection and tolerance, with the aim of understanding how humoral immune responses are shaped in health and disease.
Selected publications
- Schips M, Mitra T, Bandyopadhyay A, Meyer-Hermann M. Suppressive might of a few: T follicular regulatory cells impede auto-reactivity despite being outnumbered in the germinal centres. Front Immunol. 2023;14:1253704. doi:10.3389/fimmu.2023.1253704
- Nakagawa R, Toboso-Navasa A, Schips M, et al. Permissive selection followed by affinity-based proliferation of GC light zone B cells dictates cell fate and ensures clonal breadth. PNAS. 2021;118(2):e2016425118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2016425118