Please join us at the latest instalment of the Wright-Fleming Institute Infection and Immunity Seminar Series.

About the speaker

Viki Male is a Sir Henry Dale Fellow and Lecturer in Reproductive Immunology based in the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College London.
Viki did her PhD at the University of Cambridge on NK cells in human pregnancy. She then went on to a post-doctoral project investigating the transcriptional control of NK cell development in mice, which she undertook at Imperial College London. In 2015, she started her own laboratory at the Royal Free Hospital Campus of UCL. Working closely with the liver transplant team, her group showed that long-lived resident NK cells are present in the human liver and defined some of that pathways by which they develop. They also showed that NK cells recruited to the liver become less functional in obesity-associated liver disease, and that this is associated with a decreased ability to clear cancer cells.

In 2019, Viki returned to reproductive immunology, joining Imperial College London and the medical research charity Borne, which aims to prevent preterm birth. Using clinical samples and a novel mouse model, her research group is investigating how ILCs in the uterus work to establish and maintain pregnancy, and how this may fail in disorders of pregnancy such as pre-eclampsia and pre-term birth.