Prof. Charlotte Scott, recipient of the Baillet Latour Biomedical Award 2026
Charlotte Scott (VIB-UGent Institute) was presented with the Baillet Latour Biomedical Award by Her Majesty the Queen during a ceremony held on Tuesday, April 21, 2026. She is being honored for her research on the behavior and role of certain groups of macrophage cells in liver diseases.
Professor Scott currently serves as a Professor of Immunology at UGENT and as a Principal Investigator at the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research. In these roles, she leads groundbreaking research into the biology of macrophages, immune cells that play a fundamental role in inflammation, tissue repair, and disease progression.
Through the Baillet Latour Biomedical Award, administered by the FNRS and the FWO, the Baillet Latour Fund has been allocating €1 million annually since 2022 to independent biomedical research in Belgium. The aim is to support, over a five-year period, the careers of promising early-stage researchers in the biomedical sciences and to strengthen their status and visibility. Each year, the Award is granted in one of the following five fields: Metabolism & Gastrointestinal System (2026), Infection and Immunity (2027), Neurosciences (2028), Cancer (2029), and Cardiovascular & Pulmonary Systems (2030).
The funded project:
At the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research, the Scott Lab studies how the innate immune system—the body’s first line of defense—influences health and disease. The lab focuses on specialized immune cells such as macrophages and dendritic cells, which detect damage and coordinate tissue repair. The team addresses three key questions: (i) which immune cell populations are present in diseased tissues, (ii) what their functions are, and (iii) how their behavior can be directed to improve patient health. Their research mainly focuses on the liver, an organ essential for metabolism and detoxification, but particularly vulnerable to chronic diseases such as fibrosis, fatty liver disease, and liver cancer.
