Dr. Kirsty McHugh

Senior Postdoctoral Scientist at University of Oxford

Speaker

Dr Kirsty McHugh is a Senior Postdoctoral Scientist in Simon Draper’s Blood-stage malaria research group in Oxford, and a Fellow in Biochemistry at Pembroke College. She completed her DPhil in Clinical Medicine at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in the Arthritis group headed by Paul Bowness, before moving to the Botnar Research Centre to continue postdoctoral research into the role of HLA-B27 in arthritis. She joined the Draper group in 2015 to work on developing novel monoclonal antibody therapeutic interventions for haematological disorders before switching her focus to infectious disease. Her research now centres around isolating monoclonal antibodies to better understand vaccine-induced antibody responses. Through a better understanding of the epitope landscape of vaccine antigens she hopes to help guide the design of next-generation malaria vaccines.