Tell us about your research?

I am an immunologist at heart. I study the immune system. I try and understand how immune responses happen in tissues in places where an infection occurred or damage might have been caused. For example, I work on the immune response in mesothelioma which is a cancer of the pleural space (the membranes that cover the lungs).

I'm interested in how the immune system reacts to cancer and to incoming contaminants or pathogens. I'm interested in how the immune system reacts at the site of the contaminant, in the surrounding tissues.

I want to understand how we can modify that immune response to improve outcomes in terms of illness.

I started out as a parasitologist, understanding how neglected tropical diseases (NDTs) can be cured, or how the immune response can make those diseases worse in some instances. I used to work on Schistosomiasis and how the immune system was activated in response to that disease, and from there I moved on to looking at specific immune cell types, dendritic cells and macrophages which activate the immune system. I'm interested in what's called the innate immune system, which is the inflammatory context that these cells work in.

I grew up in Barrow-in-Furness. Mesothelioma is a big problem in that area because of occupational exposure to asbestos from working in the shipyards. So my research looks at how we can help with that environmental toxin, and other similar industrial structures like carbon nanotubes that are too big for the immune system to clear.

I'd want the impact of my work to be early diagnosis from exposure so we could implement early therapeutic treatments. At present, you can be exposed to asbestos or similar and then it can be forty years before the disease manifests and of course by then it's too late to do anything. If we could say, this person has just been exposed, what can we do to prevent this becoming mesothelioma, that would be ideal.