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Professor & Head of Department Telephone: +61 3 9902 9138 PA: Sherrie Young |
Career:
Professor Stephen Turner is currently Head of Department and a NHRMC Principal Research Fellow. He was awarded his PhD in Viral Immunology from Monash University in 1997. He completed postdoctoral training with Dr Janet Ruby (University of Melbourne) studying pox viral pathogenesis, and then with Nobel Laureate, Professor Peter Doherty (St Jude Children's Research Hospital, USA) looking at influenza T cell immunity. He returned to the University of Melbourne with Professor Doherty as a research fellow and was awarded an NHMRC RD Wright Fellowship in 2005 and established his own research group. He was been awarded a Pfizer Australia Senior Research Fellowship in 2007, an ARC Future Fellowship (FT3) in 2012. He has held numerous ARC discovery and NHMRC projects grants, including currently being CIA on an NHMRC program grant that focuses on T cell immunity to influenza.
Research Interests:
His research interests utilize a combination of structural biology, genomics, systems biology, recombinant viral technology and cellular immunology to examine molecular factors that impact T cell responses to virus infection.
Within eukaryotic cells, genomic DNA is wrapped around a complex of histone proteins to form a structure termed chromatin. Post-translational modifications (PTMs) of histone proteins are an important mechanism for the regulation of gene transcription. Upon activation, naïve T cells undergo a program of proliferation and acquisition of lineage specific functions. Importantly, exactly how factors, such as epigenetic regulation, chromatin remodelling and cell specific transcription factors, regulate acquisition and maintenance of T cell effector function are largely not understood. By using a multidisciplinary approach that includes the application of multiple next generation sequencing applications (RNA-seq, ChiP-seq, ATAC-seq, and HiC), small molecule inhibitor treatment of epigenetic and transcriptional regulators, novel transgenic and gene deficient mouse models, viral models of immunity and advanced bioinformatics, Professor Turner's laboratory aims to identify novel transcriptional and epigenetic pathways and regulatory elements that regulate virus-specific killer T cell differentiation, function and the establishment of immunological memory. Such analysis will lead to the identification of molecular immune correlates of protective immunity that will serve to better understand how optimal immunity is generated. Further, this information will contribute to improvement of immunotherapies for infection (vaccines), autoimmune disease and cancer therapy.
