Peter Tougaard

What are you investigating?

I am an immunologist by trade and recently discovered some novel cell types exiting the neonatal thymus in organ cultures during inflammatory conditions. My team and I have tried to identify these cells and, via single-cell RNA-sequencing, determined them to be a group of innate lymphoid cells (ILC) known as type 1 ILC1s. We have shown that they exit the neonatal thymus in vivo using thymus grafts and confocal imaging. Our results demonstrate that the thymus is more than a T cell factory and that thymus-derived ILC1s can expand and exit the neonatal thymus into the periphery during acute inflammation.

Outside research, what is your favorite thing about VIB?

VIB is a large community that provides many events for networking with colleagues and free training opportunities and conferences. 

What’s your favorite thing about your job?

I love the diversity of my job. Whether I am teaching, performing lab work, or writing, it requires very different skill sets, and I like to challenge myself in all these areas to become better. I find core facilities and the new technologies available at VIB fantastic, and I have been very happy to try out several new techniques in my research.

The scientific process entails a lot of failures and things not going as planned along the way. How do you deal with that aspect of the work?

I make sure always to have several projects ongoing. If one is running slower than the other or showing more promise, I follow that thread. I use a lot of time on my initial study questions and make sure that I work on projects that have multiple outcomes that could all be interesting, although one outcome or hypothesis may be more novel than others. 

I try to avoid projects with dichotomous study questions where it either works or does not work. If an aspect of the immunological question is not known yet, figuring out which hypothesis is the right one out of multiple is still a good story to publish.

What keeps you busy outside the lab? / What are your hobbies?

I tend to be quite nerdy in my hobbies. I love playing board games, which is my main pass times with friends along with making nice food. I play squash in weekends and have recently started playing a very interesting campaign of Dungeons and Dragons.