AMS Professorship award for Professor Petter Brodin, Imperial College London

In the past 5-years, my multidisciplinary team of experimental and computational immunologists have been able to develop novel methods for decoding human immune systems using systems biology.

At Imperial College London we want to take these methods further and apply them to unique samples from children with a variety of immune mediated disorders and spanning the diverse populations of west London.

If supported by this fellowship I will be able to establish a systems immunology research program at Imperial college that could transform the way, we as clinicians can interpret and predict immune responses in human patients.

We believe that this fellowship together with the strong support for my research provided by Imperial College hold tremendous potential for enhancing not only my own research program but also enhance the work of other researchers and clinical scholars at Imperial College and the Imperial NHS trust.

If awarded this fellowship, our team would be able to recruit a senior level postdoc and one technician to work on our proposed project to decode the regulatory logic of the human immune system.

This project involves advanced single-cell methods such as multiomics profiling of individual blood cells after in vitro stimulation and modulation of immune cell composition to investigate the relationship between cell composition and functional competence of individual immune cells.

With such data we then want to model cell-cell communication and regulation, to be able to predict future responses in human patients.

The project is complex and requires both a skilled technician for generation of data and a senior computational biologist for data analysis and modelling.

To enable this project the AMS fellowship would be transformative as no other funding currently has been awarded to enable these research positions and the associated reagent costs to be covered.

We firmly believe that generating mechanistic data on cell-cell communication and regulatory logic will be of outmost importance in the future as we aim to translate human systems immunology research into novel diagnostic methods and better understanding of human diseases.

For the development of my own career an AMS professorship would be tremendously important and would allow me to join a unique network of professors, fellows, and honorary fellows to get inspired and learn from and possibly also establish novel collaborations with. I hope to learn more about how to successfully lead research teams and research programs.

I hope to learn more about policies and infrastructure related to research in the UK and better my chances of being successful in my own research programs at Imperial College London. I hope all of this will be made possible if I was awarded this prestigious AMS professorship.