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MRC HIU appoints new Director

Awards and Appointments General

We are pleased to announce that Professor Alison Simmons has been appointed as the new Director of the MRC Human Immunology Unit.

Professor Alison Simmons

Professor Alison Simmons FMedSci will start as Director of the Medical Research Council Human Immunology Unit (MRC HIU) from the 18 January 2021.

The MRC HIU aims to further our understanding of how the immune system functions to develop better treatment strategies against infectious diseases, cancer, allergy and autoimmune diseases. The Unit’s research spans basic to translational immunology focussed on the development of experimental medicine programmes.

Professor Simmons said: “I am delighted to be appointed as Director of the MRC Human Immunology Unit. The MRC HIU has a long and auspicious history of fundamental immune breakthroughs, pioneering the field of human immunology and extending discovery across a wide range of human immune and infectious diseases.

Recently, state of the art technological advances have led to description of immune pathogenesis in human tissues in unprecedented depth. This opens whole new possibilities to harness the immune system for health and in the HIU we hope to bridge that gap over the coming years. Our unique grouping of clinical, basic science and computational expertise will enable us to tackle these problems to drive innovation.”

The full story is available on the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine website

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