Professor Fiona Powrie

Fiona is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford. She gained a PhD from the University of Oxford before moving to the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto. She returned to the University of Oxford in 1996 where she was the Sidney Truelove Professor of Gastroenterology from 2009-2014.

Fiona’s research is focused on interactions between the intestinal microbiome and the immune system and how this dialogue breaks down in inflammatory bowel disease and cancer. Her work has identified an essential role for regulatory T cells in maintaining intestinal homeostasis. She has also shown that both adaptive and innate immune mechanisms contribute to intestinal inflammation and identified the cytokine IL-23 as a therapeutic target in inflammatory bowel disease. She received the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2012), is a Fellow of the Royal Society, international member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Governor of the Wellcome Trust.