Dr Rebecca Drummond recently joined the Institutes of Immunology and Immunotherapy and Microbiology and Infection as a Birmingham Fellow. Dr Drummond will be establishing a new research group that aims to understand how the immune system senses responds to fungal infections.
Fungal infections are a significant burden in modern day healthcare, causing diseases that range from the very common vaginal and oral candidiasis (thrush) to life-threatening lung diseases and invasive infections that can result in multi-organ failure. Collectively, fungi cause over a million deaths per year around the world and a significantly greater number of mucosal infections.
Dr Drummond joins the University of Birmingham from the National Institutes of Health, United States of America, where she spent the last four years working to understand why some people are more likely to get serious fungal infections so that they can be better treated in the clinic. Prior to that, she studied at the world-renowned Aberdeen Fungal Group at the University of Aberdeen, where her studies led to important new understandings of how antifungal immunity is controlled in different organs.
“I am excited to begin my research at the University of Birmingham, and look forward to working with colleagues in the Institutes of Immunology and Immunotherapy and Microbiology and Infection. Both of these Institutes have significant strengths in leukocyte trafficking and function as well as host-pathogen interactions, which will be an excellent fit for my work. We will be utilising techniques in both immunology and microbiology to better understand how the immune system protects against fungal diseases, so that we can better help those patients with damaged immune systems that become vulnerable to these types of infections." – Dr Rebecca Drummond