Max Dale Cooper

Max Dale Cooper ( born August 21, 1933, Hazlehurst, Mississippi) is an American immunologist.

Cooper went in Bentonia, Mississippi to school, where he was the son of a teacher couple. From 1951 he was at Holmes Junior College, studied at the University of Mississippi (Bachelor 1954), where in 1955 he took a degree in medicine, followed by an MD degree in 1957 from Tulane University Medical School. Since 1967 he worked as an immunologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham ( Alabama). Cooper is a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. He is there at the Emory Vaccine Center and Emory Center for AIDS Research.

He has been a visiting scientist at the University of London, at the Hospital for Sick Children in London, the University of Minnesota, Tulane University and the Institut Pasteur in Paris.

He studied with his group Fc receptor -like molecules ( FcRL, FC- like Receptor ) on B cells, their distribution, genetics and function.

Cooper was with his group also besides the usual immune system with B cells, T cells and major histocompatibility complexes ( MHCs ), which is found only in vertebrates, another system in jawless vertebrates such as lampreys. Where there are no B- cell receptors, T-cell receptors or MHC like other vertebrate animals, but they have an adaptive immune system that is based on variable lymphocyte receptors ( VLR) with leucine-rich repeats ( LRR).

In 2010 he received the Robert Koch Prize. He received a Howard Hughes Medical Investigatorship Award, the 3m Life Sciences Award and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008 he received the Avery - Landsteiner Prize.

He is married, has a daughter and three sons.