About me

Prof Adrian Liston, BSc GCertHE MPH PhD FMedSci FRSBI am Senior Group Leader at the Babraham Institute and Senior Research Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. I currently hold a part-time professorship at the University of Leuven, Belgium, from my previous role there. I am also Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Director of the spin-off biotech company Aila Biotech and Editor-in-Chief Elect at Immunology & Cell Biology. 

I grew up in a truck-driving family in Adelaide, Australia, and was the first in my family to finish high school. My upbringing taught me to value honesty and integrity, and left me with a fierce understanding that academic systems were not set up for me. My life as an immigrant, daddy, scientist and teacher have taught me to value kindness and empathy, and to understand that we can nurture growth beyond perceived limitations. Legacy is central to my identity - we are what we leave behind, whether that is teaching our children and students to be kinder and wiser than us, building institutions around us to reach new heights that live on after we leave, or making scientific discoveries that improve the world for the next generation.

My work

My PhD research was on T cell tolerance and diabetes with Professor Chris Goodnow at the Australian National University, followed by post-doctoral research on regulatory T cell biology with Professor Sasha Rudensky at the University of Washington.

In 2009 I set up my independent laboratory at the VIB and the University of Leuven, and founded two core facilities, on flow cytometry and CrispR. In 2019, I relocated my research team to the Babraham Institute, in Cambridge, UK. Fortunately, my team had developed over the years to include incredibly talented senior staff, with three former post-docs, Prof Susan Schlenner, Prof Stephanie Humblet-Baron and Prof Lidia Yshii, taking on tenure-track positions and taking over the running of my laboratory and the core facilities. While my position at the University of Leuven is ending this year, with my final PhD students graduating, I am proud that the laboratory and facilities I founded are stronger than ever, and thriving under my successful alumni. Together we trained 144 staff and students over my decade in Belgium, with 18 post-docs, 18 PhD students, 26 Masters students, 18 technicians and 64 short-stay scholars (mostly through the Erasmus program). The programs I founded in clinical immunology, immunogenetics and neuroimmunology are successfully thriving under my alumni. Beyond our tenure-track alumni, we have alumni around Belgium and world in leading positions, such as Dr Dean Franckaert (Director at CellCarta), Dr Annemarie van Nieuwenhuijze (Head of Biology at Confo Therapeutics) and Dr Carlos Roca (Associate Director of Bioinformatics Data Science at Astra-Zeneca). To read about more of my alumni from the Leuven decade, see my twitter thread here. We also had 15 lab babies, of whom my own son was the first - take a read here if you are interested in my experience as a scientist and parent.

In 2019, I relocated my research team to the Babraham Institute, in Cambridge, UK. I was very fortunate to have five team members move with me, to keep our expertise and build on past successes, in particular Dr James Dooley (in the lab since 2009) and Dr Oliver Burton (in the lab since 2017) who are still with me. Our laboratory has hosted exceptionally productive scientists, with more than 200 scientific papers and >14,000 citations arising from the lab, with expertise across multiple fields including immune development (e.g. Papadopoulou et al, Nature Immunology 2012), diabetes (e.g. Dooley et al, Nature Genetics 2016), clinical immunology (e.g. Masters et al, Science Translational Medicine 2016), systems immunology (e.g. Carr et al, Nature Immunology 2016), bioinformatics (e.g. Roca et al, Nature Communications 2021), regulatory T cell biology (e.g. Pierson et al, Nature Immunology 2013) and neuroimmunology (e.g. Pasciuto et al, Cell 2020). For a complete list of laboratory publications, click here. Prof Kailash Singh is the first of our Babraham alumni to go on to a tenured position, at Uppsala University.

During the pandemic, we worked extensively on basic and clinical research for SARS-CoV-2, including work testing the AstraZeneca vaccine in mice, and using systems immunology to predict clinical outcome and vaccine response in patients. I also worked on the COVID diagnostics committee and the COVID ramp-up committee, to ensure the Babraham Institute could function in a safe manner during the pandemic. Our laboratory was also heavily involved in public engagement to promote safe behaviours and vaccine uptake, including releasing three illustrated children's books "All about Coronavirus", "Battle Robots of the Blood" and "Maya's Marvellous Medicine", and an online educational game, VirusFighter, that teaches about viral spread and the use of vaccines and social distancing. I have been awarded fellowship to the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Francqui Chair, the Eppendorf Prize, a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award and three ERC grants, among other honours.

If you would like to know more about me or my research, my CV is available here, you can join me on Twitter, or read my lab blog for a decade of thoughts about science careers: how early career scientists can navigate the academic career pathway and succeed in starting their own lab, and what should be done to make scientific careers more equitable.

My vision for Pathology

As an advocate for fair and transparent governance, I want to share with all members of Pathology my vision for the department. I see the Head of Department role as, first and foremost, a service position. As Head, I would commit myself to actively building the department and working together to achieve our common mission. I would like to opportunity to meet with, and listen to, all departmental members in the process of formulating a formal mission and strategy. I would, however, propose the mission of the Department to be three-fold:

1. To provide a supportive environment of personal growth and career advancement/stability to our departmental members. Read about my strategic priorities for staff growth here. 
2. To undertake transformative research in the field of pathology. Read about my strategic priorities for research here.  
3. To achieve excellence in the teaching and broader communication of pathology. Read about my teaching experience and active conceptual learning philosophy here and my strategic priorities for teaching here.  

Our mission needs to be central to our behaviour as a department. It is therefore important to bring our departmental members together into sharing a common mission, and to ensure that policies and structures within the department align to our mission. Equality, diversity and inclusivity fundementally underlies all three missions: we cannot be supportive without being inclusive, we need to achieve equality of opportunity to perform the best research, and excellence in teaching requires understanding diversity among our students. Equality, diversity and inclusion therefore need to be deep-seated core values, and not performative tokens. If you ever believe we are not living up to our ideals, talk to me, challenge me. I can't promise I'll always agree, but I can promise I will always listen, engage and try to do the best for the department.