Sumaira Hasnain
University of Queensland, QLD, Australia
Sumaira Hasnain graduated with her PhD in December 2010 from The University of Manchester. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Mater Research Institute-University of Queensland with a team of 9 researchers. A/Prof Hasnain was the first globally to demonstrate that immunity can modulate protein production in secretory cells in infection and chronic diseases. Her long-term vision has been to characterise these novel immune factors and manipulate them therapeutically using pre-clinical models of immune-driven pathologies. She holds a patent for targeted immunotherapy in metabolic disease which has led to the formation of a spin-off company, Jetra Therapeutics and venture capitalist funding to progress this in Fatty Liver Disease. She has a rapid upward trajectory in research, evident by extensive body of high-quality publications including in Nature Medicine, Oncogene and Gastroenterology. She has been awarded more than $4 million in competitive funding and has won 21 awards to date, including an award from the Children’s Health Foundation in 2019 and the QLD Tall Poppy Award 2020. She is an associate editor for the Clinical and Translational Immunology Journal (impact factor 7.2). She is a well-recognised emerging leader in the field as evidenced by a recent invitation to chair at the Immunology 2020 conference by American Association of Immunology.