Monday 4 March 2024

Professor Daniela Ferreira Awarded Prestigious NIHR Research Professorship

Keble Fellow by Special Election, Professor Daniela Ferreira, has been awarded the prestigious 5-year Research Professorship, the flagship award by the National Institute of Health and Care Research.

Professor Ferreira is a Professor of Mucosal Immunity and Infection at the Oxford Vaccine Group, Oxford University Department of Paediatrics and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, she is one of 5 individuals awarded this role which offers awards of up to £2 million, support posts and access to a leadership and development programme.

The NIHR Research Professorship ‘aims to fund research leaders of the future to promote effective translation of research’. It is designed to support ‘health, public health and social care researchers and methodologists with an outstanding research record of clinical and applied health and care research and its effective translation for improved health and care’.

Professor Ferreira ‘played a substantial role in the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including the leadership of the Liverpool’s STOP COVID response and the NIHR NWC Vaccine Alliance Liverpool. Her Liverpool-based team was a trial site for Covid vaccine studies including the Phase II/III of the Oxford/AZ vaccine’.

Her research will now focus on improving our understanding of nasal immunity to enhance vaccine protection against respiratory infections.

She explains: “I am delighted to be awarded this Professorship by the NIHR. For over 20 years I have worked on understanding and preventing chest infections caused by a bacteria called pneumococcus. I now want to find answers to some important questions about how getting sick with multiple infections – viruses and bacteria at the same time – can make pneumonia worse, and how we can use our body’s responses, particularly in the nose and lungs, to reduce the numbers of people who get ill and spread disease in communities.”