Research Fellow in Immunology

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Updated: 3 months ago
Location: Dublin Bar, LEINSTER
Job Type: FullTime
Deadline: 31 Jan 2025

Applications are invited for a fully funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow position in the McLoughlin Lab at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity College Dublin.  The project will investigate the prospect of harnessing protective immune responses as an attractive approach for the development of novel therapeutic interventions, specifically towards the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus which causes a staggering 1 million deaths annually.  Advancement of this project requires enhanced mechanistic understanding of protective immunity plus new insights into mechanisms of immunity deployed against this notorious human pathogen. Emerging evidence suggests that gdT cells play an important role in the protective immune response to S. aureus.  Critically, these cells could offer a significant advantage when dealing with intracellular S. aureus due to their ability to exert cytotoxic effects. gdT cells are being successfully exploited in cancer immunotherapies to improve clinical outcomes with recent studies demonstrating that anti-tumour activities of gdT cells can be enhanced through metabolic reprogramming. Whether this approach could be adopted to promote their protective functions during infection, is the question being addressed in this project.

The project will employ cutting edge technologies (transcriptomics, metagenomics, in vivo infection models) to profile the phenotype and function of gdT cells during S. aureus infection in both pre-clinical models and in cohorts of S. aureus bloodstream infection patients, with a particular focus on dissecting the cytotoxic functions of gdT cells. State-of-the-art single cell metabolomic assays will be employed to explore the metabolic landscape that imbues gdT cells with the capacity to target intracellular S. aureus and so support the development of strategies to metabolically reprogramme these cells towards enhanced effector functions. This is a great opportunity to pursue cutting edge immunology research in the context of infection in a dynamic and supportive research environment.


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