Dr Kristy LeDoare
Imperial College, United Kingdom

Dr Le Doare is UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Professor of Global Health within the Paediatric Infectious Diseases Research Group at St. George’s, University of London.

Her research interests are age-related immune responses to infectious diseases, in particular to Group B-streptococcus (GBS). She is interested in improving our knowledge of how maternal antibody in vaginal fluid, blood and breast milk is passed to babies and how this protects them from colonisation and disease. Her focus is on harnessing these tools of nature (basic pathophysiology and immunity) to improve vaccines and prevention strategies, coupled with clinical vaccine studies at her maternal vaccination platform site in Kampala, Uganda.

She leads the GASTON initiative to determine serocorrelates of protection against GBS and is part of the WHO task-force to defeat meningitis by 2030 and develop the pathway for licensing the GBS vaccine. She has close collaborations with colleagues at the CDC, FDA and academic and industrial groups both in the UK and overseas. She also leads the PROGRESS and PREPARE studies which seek to investigate serocorrelates of protection against GBS disease in seven African and European countries.

Website: https://www.sgul.ac.uk/about/our-institutes/infection-and-immunity/research-themes/working-internationally/tackling-group-b-streptococcus
Twitter : @kirstyledoare