Professor Jenefer Blackwell obtained her B.Sc. at the University of Western Australia in 1969, with a double major in Zoology and Botany, and First Class Honours in Zoology. Her PhD in Population Genetics, carried out in the Department of Zoology at the University of Western Australia, was awarded in 1974. From her first postdoctoral positions in Australia Jennie proceeded to work with David Bradley at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, rapidly progressing from postdoctoral research that culminated in a Nature paper on the role of MHC in leishmanial infection in mice in 1980, to award of a prestigious Wellcome Trust Senior Lectureship in 1982. In 1988 Dr. Blackwell became Head of the Immunobiology of Parasitic Disease Unit at LSHTM, with a Readership was conferred in 1989. In 1991 she was recruited to Cambridge to the newly created Glaxo Chair in Molecular Parasitology where she immediately became actively engaged in fund raising to build a new biomedical research institute on the Addenbrooke's Hospital site. This culminated in her appointment in 1998 as the Founding Director of the new Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (www.cimr.cam.ac.uk), a rotating position that she handed on in 2001. She retains an interest in the running of the CIMR as a member of the Strategy Committee.
Professor Blackwell´s appointment to Cambridge also coincided with her role in promoting parasite genome projects. She was Chairman of the WHO Leishmania Genome Consortium from 1992 to 2003, promoting applications for funding genomic sequencing of Leishmania, now completed and published in Science in 2005, and establishing functional genomics studies including microarray expression profiling and screens for novel Leishmania vaccines from output of the genome project. Her contribution to infectious disease research was recognised by award of the Chris Wright Medal in 1994, the Leverhulme Medal in 2000, and election as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2000. Professor Blackwell continues in her role as Glaxo Professor for Molecular Parasitology in Cambridge, with current research focusing on her long-standing interest in identifying the genes that determine susceptibility to TB, leprosy, toxoplasmosis and visceral leishmaniasis in humans. She has research initiatives all over the globe including Hong Kong, Brazil, pan-Europe, India, Malawi, Sudan, USA and Vietnam. Professor Blackwell has published over 200 papers in international journals. Highlights of her latest research include:
• Genetic linkage and association studies of predisposition to mycobacterial infections.
• Studies of Slc11a2 and Slc11a1 gene in transgenic smf1/2/3 KO yeast and Bsd2/Rer1 KO yeast. This is the first assay of Slc11a1 transport function in yeast.
• Candidate gene analysis of babies that develop clinical signs when infected with toxoplasmosis in utero
• Genome scans on multicase families with visceral leishmaniasis from Sudan, Brazil and India.
• Role of regulatory T cells in vaccine-induced immunity in a murine model of Leishmania major infection. |