Peter Openshaw, Professor of Experimental Medicine, Imperial College London
Prof Peter Openshaw is a respiratory physician and mucosal immunologist, studying how the immune system both protects against viral infection but also causes disease.
He has worked on RSV and influenza since the mid-1980s, leading a large Wellcome Trust funded consortium (‘MOSAIC’) to investigate the pathogenesis of human influenza (2009-12). He was President of the British Society for Immunology (2013-18) and is vice-Chair or NERVTAG, a Department of Health committee horizon-scanning for emerging respiratory threats. He was previously a member of SAGE on pandemic influenza from 2009-12. He directs MRC and EU-funded studies of human volunteers infected with RSV and influenza and HIC-Vac, an MRC-funded international consortium that promotes the use of human challenge to accelerate vaccine development as well as being a member of the UK Vaccine Network. He is Theme Lead for Infection at the Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Respiratory Infections Section Head within the National Heart and Lung Institute and an NIHR Senior Investigator. He co-leads ISARIC4C, a UK-wide consortium established in 2020 to study the COVID-19 pandemic and is a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences–British Society for Immunology expert taskforce on immunology and COVID-19
