Laura Mackay
The University of Melbourne
Australia
Associate Professor Laura Mackay is a Principle Research Fellow at The Peter Doherty Institute at The University of Melbourne and holds an Adjunct appointment at the Singapore Immunology Network at A*STAR in Singapore. Laura obtained her PhD from The University of Birmingham, U.K. in 2009, before taking up a post-doctoral position with Prof Francis Carbone at the University of Melbourne. She established an independent group at the Peter Doherty Institute in 2016, where her Laboratory studies memory T cell responses, with a focus on the signals that control tissue-resident memory T cell differentiation, with a view to harness these cells to develop new treatments against infection and cancer. Laura is currently a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Bill & Melinda Gates International Scholar, a Sylvia & Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation Senior Medical Research Fellow, and a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Career Development Fellow. Her research is supported by several Project Grants from the NHMRC, and she is the recipient of awards including The Gottschalk Medal (2019, Australian Academy of Science), The Michelson Prize for Human Immunology (2018) and The Victorian Young Tall Poppy Award (2016). Laura is a co-host on Melbourne Triple R Radio science show Einstein-A-Go-Go and the President of The Federation of Immunological Societies of Asia-Oceania (FIMSA).