Michelle Boyle
A/Prof Boyle (Snow Fellow 2024, CSL Centenary Fellow 2023) is a Working Group head at the Burnet Institute, leading the Cellular Responses to Disease and Vaccination team. Michelle completed her PhD in 2012 at the University of Melbourne, where she developed new methods to study the invasion blood stage form of the malaria parasite, known as P. falciparum merozoites. A/Prof Boyle has applied these methods to understand the mechanisms of naturally acquired and vaccine-induced antibodies that protect from malaria. This research demonstrated that the vast majority of human antibodies require interaction with complement to prevent parasite growth, and that complement-fixing antibodies are strongly associated with protection from malaria. Following her PhD, A/Prof Boyle pursued her post-doctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco, where she focused on investigating the role of T cells in naturally acquired immunity to malaria in children from areas of low and high malaria transmission in Uganda. This research revealed that regulatory CD4+ T cell responses can disrupt protective immunity in children with high malaria exposure. In 2018, A/Prof Boyle was recruited to QIMR Berghofer as an EMBL-Australia Group Leader program. This program focuses on identifying the cellular mechanisms underpinning antibody development, and how these processes are disrupted by malaria infection. A/Prof is using this knowledge to identify and test host directed therapies that can redirect the immune response to malaria to enhance protective immunity.
Abstracts this author is presenting: