Eloise Nee

I am a DPhil Student supervised by Anita Milicic, Mark Coles, and Calliope Dendrou, primarily based at the Kennedy institute of Rheumatology.  My undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences at University College London (UCL) where I worked on the role of fatty acid membranes in the origin of life. In particular, I studied how primitive early membranes can be stabilised by incorporation of isoprenoid based fatty acids against the harsh conditions that would be found under hydrothermal conditions in the early Earth.

I now research the early mechanisms in myeloid and non-haematopoietic cells that drive increased vaccination-induced protection against infection, employing novel liposome and emulsion based adjuvants. My current work uses flow cytometry, confocal microscopy, and RNA quantification to map the distribution and early kinetics of adjuvants in space, time and cell tropism in the draining lymph nodes following immunisation. Guided by our data on the distribution and kinetics of these adjuvants, I wish to analyse the cellular and transcriptomic basis of adjuvant mechanisms of action through single cell-sequencing, to identify shared or divergent processes that are triggered by vaccine adjuvants.