Professor Gillian Griffiths FMedSci
Gillian Griffiths obtained her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Cesar Milstein. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, she started her own research laboratory at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland in 1990. She subsequently held posts at University College London and the Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford from 1997 to 2007. She was also a Fellow by Special Election of Exeter College. She then moved to the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research where she was Director 2012-2017. She was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2005, EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) in 2006, and the Royal Society in 2013.
Professor Griffiths’ research is focused on the interface between cell biology and immunology aimed at understanding the mechanisms controlling polarised secretion from cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), the killer cells of the immune system which destroy virally infected and cancer cells. She was awarded the Royal Society Buchanan medal in 2019 in recognition of her ground-breaking research establishing the fundamental cell biological mechanisms that drive CTL killing, laying the foundations for the development of targeted cancer immunotherapy.
