IIT External Seminar: Gillian Griffiths

Our next IIT externmal seminar will take place on Thursday 14 December. Prof. Gillian Griffiths from the University of Cambridge will present: "Curiouser and curiouser: looking inside CTLs to see how they work." 

About the Speaker

Professor Gillian Griffiths obtained her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Cesar Milstein.  After a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, she started her own research laboratory at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland in 1990.   She subsequently held posts at University College London, the Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford (1997-2007) before moving to the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research where she was Director 2102-2017.  She was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2005); EMBO (2006), and the Royal Society (2013). 

Her research is focused at the interface between cell biology and immunology aimed at understanding the mechanisms controlling polarised secretion from cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), the killer cells of the immune system which destroy virally infected and cancer cells.  Bringing together clinical and basic biomedical research, she pioneered the use of CTLs from patients with genetic disorders to study cell biology in a specialized cell type in order to identify many of the molecular mechanisms controlling secretion.

She was awarded the Royal Society Buchanan medal (2019) in recognition of her ground-breaking research establishing the fundamental cell biological mechanisms that drive CTL killing, laying the foundations for the development of targeted cancer immunotherapy.

12pm - Seminar (Pears Building and online via Teams - please contact Hanh Gurr: h.gurr@ucl.ac.uk)

• Please contact host Prof. Steve Ley (steven.ley@ucl.ac.uk) and Hanh Gurr (h.gurr@ucl.ac.uk) to organise one-to-one meetings with Professor Holden between 2pm and 5pm.