We are delighted to announce that Professor Emma Slack will be joining the College as part of her appointment as the inaugural Barclay-Williams Professor of Molecular Immunology at the Dunn School.
Professor Slack is a leader in the rapidly growing field of the human gut microbiome. Her group investigates the interactions between bacteria and the gut. Epitomising the overall strategy of the Dunn School, her twin goals are to discover fundamental immunological principles, and to pioneer oral vaccines and methods of engineering the microbiome to improve health and protect against disease.
In 2021, for example, Professor Slack developed a new oral vaccine against food poisoning by Salmonella that relies on manipulating how the pathogen evolves in the gut. This vaccine can be combined with supplementation of the microbiota to generate sterilizing immunity in the intestine.
Emma Slack is currently a Professor of Mucosal Immunology at the ETH Zurich, and prior to that, was a postdoc in Canada and Bern. Her work has been recognised by the Mucosal Immunology Society Emerging Leader Prize (2022), the European Federation of Immunology Societies Lecture award (2022), and the ETH Latsis prize (2017) for the best research across the full ETH portfolio.
The Barclay Williams Chair of Molecular Immunology was endowed by the CIU Trust and the EPA Research Fund and is named in honour of the distinguished Dunn School immunologists Alan Williams and Neil Barclay.
