Career History & Research Interests

Sarah Rowland-Jones trained in medicine in Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and then in Infectious Diseases in London and Oxford. She is currently Professor of Immunology in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine in Oxford, where she leads the "HIV immunology and Global Health" research group.  Her research focuses on the role of cellular immune responses to viral infections, particularly HIV-1-specific T-cells and how viral evolution leads to evasion of T-cell recognition. Her group has studied immune responses to HIV in highly exposed but apparently uninfected people, most notably sex workers in The Gambia and Kenya, and more recently in infants exposed to HIV from infected mothers, with the aim of discovering what components of the immune response a vaccine should stimulate to confer protection against HIV infection. Between 2001 and 2004, she was the Director of the Oxford Centre for Tropical Medicine, which coordinates Oxford-linked research activities in Tropical medicine and international health, particularly in research units in Thailand, Vietnam and Kenya. In 2004 she moved to West Africa as Director of Research of the MRC Laboratories, the Gambia, the UK's oldest and largest overseas research unit, where her research interests focused on HIV-2 pathogenesis and the development of infant immunity in response to pathogens and vaccines in early life. She is clinically active and holds an Honorary Consultant contract in Infectious Diseases at the Oxford University Radcliffe Hospital Trust, spending 2-3 months/year on clinical service on the adult ID ward. She is Vice President of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and chairs the Meetings committee: she is also a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford.