Rolf M. Zinkernagel

Rolf Martin Zinkernagel is a Swiss experimental immunologist, born in 1944, who is a professor of experimental immunology at the University of Zurich. He took his medical degree at the University of Basel in 1970 and his doctorate at the Australian National University in 1975. With the Australian Peter C. Doherty he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells: killer T cells must recognize both a viral antigen and a major histocompatibility complex class I molecule on the cell surface. He became the 24th Swiss Nobel laureate and received the Companion of the Order of Australia in 1999.