We are pleased to announce the Cold Spring Harbor Asia conference on Bacterial Infection & Host Defense which will be held in Suzhou, China, located approximately 60 miles west of Shanghai. The conference will begin at 7:00pm on the evening of Monday May 11, and will conclude in the evening after banquet on Thursday May 14, 2026.

The conference will include eight oral sessions and one poster session covering the latest findings across many topics in Bacterial Infection and Host Defense. Many talks will be selected from the openly submitted abstracts on the basis of scientific merit and relevance. Social events throughout the conference provide ample opportunity for informal interactions.

Major Topics:

1. Bacterial intracellular trafficking

2. Gene expression and virulence traits in pathogenic microbes

3. Host response to bacterial infection

4. Gastrointestinal colonization

5. The microbiome in health and disease

6. Bacterial toxins and pathogenesis

Invited Speakers:

Rupert Beale, The Francis Crick Institute

Petr Broz, University of Lausanne

Ken Cadwell, University of Pennsylvania

Jijie Chai, Westlake University 

Christoph Dehio, University of Basel

Alain Filloux, Nanyang Technological University

Scott Gray-Owen, University of Toronto

Mélanie Hamon, Institut Pasteur, Université de Paris Cité

Wolf-Dietrich Hardt, ETH Zürich

Elizabeth Hartland, Hudson Institute of Medical Research

Changtao Jiang, Peking University 

Marc Lecuit, Pasteur Institute

Min Li, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Zhao-Qing Luo, Jilin University

Hayley Newton, Monash University

Anna Norrby-Teglund, Karolinska Institute

Thomas Rudel, University of Würzburg

Suzana Salcedo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Feng Shao, National Institute of Biological Sciences

Sunny Shin, University of Pennsylvania

Christina Stallings, Washington University

Liang Tao, Westlake University  

Renee Tsolis, University of California

Yue Xu, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Dario Zamboni, Universidade de São Paulo

We encourage abstracts to contain new and unpublished materials. The abstracts must be submitted electronically by the abstract deadline. Selection of material for oral and poster presentation will be made by the organizers. Status (fellow's talk/poster) of abstracts will be posted on our web site as soon as decisions have been made by the organizers. 

Fellowship: 
We are eager to have as many young people as possible attend since they are likely to benefit most from this meeting. A certain number of presentations by graduate students and postdocs in this conference will be selected as fellowship (USD $100-$500) awards. For more details, please visit  Stipends

We look forward to seeing you at Suzhou in May, 2026.