Immunology of the exposome: addressing the crisis in chronic inflammatory disease

Stephen has researched into the mechanisms and treatment of asthma with >1000 research publications. His work has focused on components of the breathed environment and how these interact with a susceptible epithelium and airway mucosa to cause the inflammatory responses characteristic of asthma. He is a Founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, past president of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology, British Thoracic Society, British Association for Lung Research and the Collegium International Allergologicum. His work has been recognised by international awards such as the King Faisal and J Allyn Taylor International Prizes in Medicine. He currently PI of the MRC Net Zero Health Research Hub Coordination Node, Special Advisor to the RCP on Air Quality and led the 2025 report, “A Breath of Fresh Air”. He was appointed CBE in 2011 for contributions to Clinical Science and Knighted in 2020 for Medical Research.

Anna Hansell is an environmental epidemiologist, with special expertise in health impacts of air pollution on respiratory disease and in environmental noise and health. Her initial career was in respiratory medicine, after which she specialised in public health; she has been working in environmental epidemiology for over 20 years. She has conducted some of the longest running and largest UK studies looking at health effects of air pollution including bioaerosols and is one of a small number of UK epidemiologists investigating long-term health effects of transport noise.

She is a Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and founding Director of the Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability at the University of Leicester. She is director of the National Institute of Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Chemical Threats and Hazards at the University of Leicester, working with UK Health Security Agency and the Health and Safety Executive, and also the Environment Theme Lead in the Leicester NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. Anna holds an honorary consultant post with UK Health Security Agency and with the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, and chairs the UK government scientific advisory committee, the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants.

Professor James Lee is a Clinician Scientist Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute and a Consultant Gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital. He trained in medicine at the University of Oxford and gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2011 as part of the inaugural Wellcome Trust Clinical PhD Programme. In 2015, he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellowship and spent two years of this award at Harvard University before returning to the University of Cambridge in 2018 to establish a research group at the newly-opened Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease. He moved to the Crick in 2021 where he leads the Genetic Mechanisms of Disease laboratory – seeking to translate genetic associations into a better understanding of autoimmune and inflammatory disease biology.

Dr Suzanne Cloonan is Professor of Respiratory Biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biochemistry in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York.

Her research examines how environmental exposures, particularly cigarette smoke, disrupt immune and epithelial function in the lung. After completing her PhD at Trinity College Dublin and postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, she established an internationally recognised programme at Weill Cornell Medicine investigating how metabolic and mitochondrial stress reshape host–pathogen responses, inflammation and tissue repair in chronic lung disease. She relocated to Trinity in 2020 and her group uses biochemical, immunometabolic and regenerative models to understand how smoke‑driven injury rewires immunity and promotes long‑term susceptibility to infection and chronic respiratory pathology.

She holds leadership roles within the European Respiratory Society and American Thoracic Society and leads a multidisciplinary research programme supported by major national and international funding.

Dr Fränze Progatzky is a Principal Investigator at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford specialising in tissue biology. She obtained a PhD in immunology from Imperial College London and undertook her postdoctoral training in enteric neurobiology at the Francis Crick Institute. Fränze established her lab in October 2023. The work in her lab synergises and integrates her expertise and knowledge in mucosal immunology and neural biology to uncover how the peripheral nervous system, through glial cells, regulates immune responses and tissue repair in barrier organs such as the lungs, gut, and skin. She has received a prestigious Wellcome Career Development Award and a Lister Institute Research Prize.

Judi Allen has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Following a postdoc at Imperial College, London, she established her own group at the University of Edinburgh. In 2016 Judi moved to the University of Manchester, where she is currently a Professor of Immunobiology in the Lydia Becker Institute of Immunology & Inflammation and the Manchester Cell Matrix Centre, and Director of the MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology. The Allen laboratory investigates the host immune response to parasite infection with a focus on type 2 immunity, the response mammals characteristically make to large multicellular parasites (helminths). Her studies of macrophage function in type 2 settings led to an increased understanding of the evolutionary relationship between type 2 immunity, parasite control and tissue repair. Her lab is currently investigating how the type 2 cytokines, IL-4 and IL-13, regulate the extra-cellular matrix.

Fiona Powrie is the Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and Principal Investigator in the Translational Gastroenterology Unit, University of Oxford. Her research interests include characterisation of the interaction between the intestinal microbiota and the host immune system and how this mutualistic relationship breaks down in inflammatory bowel disease.

Fiona's work has identified the functional role of regulatory T cells in intestinal homeostasis and shed light on their development and mechanism of action. She has also shown that both adaptive and innate immune mechanisms contribute to intestinal inflammation and identified the IL-23 pathway as a pivotal player in the pathogenesis of chronic intestinal inflammation.

Her current work seeks to translate findings from model systems into the clinic in inflammatory bowel disease patients. Fiona received the Ita Askonas Award from the European Federation of Immunological Societies for her contribution to immunology in Europe and the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine 2012.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011, EMBO in 2013 and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014. Fiona joined the Wellcome Trust's Board of Governors in 2018.