Inaugural Lecture: Life, Death and a Career in Academic Medicine

The work carried out in Professor Whyte's laboratory addresses the challenges of inflammation and its consequences for the lung. In important lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and acute lung injury, our lungs are damaged by over-active white blood cells that infiltrate the tissues.

The therapeutic challenge is how to limit the damage caused by our immune system, whilst preserving our ability to combat infection.  During her inaugural lecture Professor Whyte will discuss work to understand what limits the responses of the most numerous white blood cell, the neutrophil, and how the survival of these cells is determined by signals generated in the local tissue environment.