Emma Slack

Barclay-Williams Professor for Molecular Mucosal Immunology
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Botnar Institute for Immune Engineering, Basel, Switzerland

Emma Slack started her scientific journey working on pattern recognition receptor signaling as a PhD student in the laboratory of Caetano Reis e Sousa at the London Research Institute and has progressively followed the question of how the immune system recognizes infectious challenge from the nice, clean, sterile environment of the spleen out to the very messy, heavily colonized environment of the gut lumen. After working as a postdoctoral fellow with Andrew Macpherson at McMaster University in Canada, she become a junior group leader within the group of Prof. Wolf-Dietrich Hardt at the ETH Zurich, bridging the fields of microbiology and immunology. Her work on elucidating the mechanisms of action of secretory IgA in the gut has been awarded with the ETH Latsis prize in 2017. She was appointed full professor at the ETH Zurich in 2022, and at the University of Oxford in 2023, where her research group explores the complex relationship between gut bacteria, host physiology and immunology.