Tao Dong
University of Oxford
UK
Tao Dong has held the post of Professor of Immunology in the MRC Human Immunology Unit at Oxford University since 2014 and is a Senior Fellow at University College Oxford. She has served as a member of the UK Medical Research Council Infection and Immunity board since 2016.
She originally gained a BSc degree in Physiology from Fudan University, Shanghai, China in 1987. She moved to Oxford University in 1993 where she received a DPhil degree in Immunology in 1998 for work carried out under the supervision of Professors Sarah Rowland-Jones and Sir Andrew McMichael on qualitative changes in HIV-specific cytotoxic T cells associated with HIV disease progression. During her postdoctoral training, where she continued to study immune responses to HIV, she expanded her research interests to include work on influenza virus infection, which led her to start her own independent research group. In 2010 she became the Head of the human anti-viral cytotoxic T cell laboratory and a Program Leader in the MRC Human Immunology Unit at Oxford University. Since 2013, the main focus of her research has switched from virus infections to cancer, with a central goal being to identify determinants of the ability of human tumour-specific cytotoxic T cells to control human tumour development and metastasis.