Professor Ellie Barnes has been appointed as Deputy Director of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford.
Professor Barnes, currently Co-theme Lead for the BRC Oxford’s Life-saving Vaccines Theme, will be Deputy Director for the remainder of this BRC funding round, until March 2028. She will support BRC Director Professor Helen McShane in developing the BRC’s application for the next round of NIHR funding.
The intention is for Professor Barnes to transition to Director of the BRC during the early phase of the next funding period, subject to the outcome of the forthcoming NIHR competition
As Professor of Hepatology and Experimental Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, Professor Barnes’s research encompasses developing new vaccines for challenging pathogens that lead to chronic disease (hepatitis B, hepatitis C, COVID-19) and cancer (Lynch syndrome, Breast, colorectal, lung and liver cancer). She has a deep understand of applied immunology, and has further applied molecular, genetic and imaging technologies seeking new strategies for early cancer detection, and she established the Liver cancer centre of excellence within Oxford Cancer. Working with clinicians, allied health professionals, scientists and industry in interdisciplinary science, she has led prominent BRC-supported studies that take experimental medicine discovery science through to efficacy studies in patients. Through a long-standing leadership role in the in the NIHR Health Informatics Collaborative, she brings additional expertise in population “Health Data Science”.
Professor Barnes said: “I am delighted and honoured to be taking on this role at such an important time, as we develop our bid for funding, which will allow us to continue to address the NHS’s most pressing priorities. I am excited to be working more closely with Helen and to have the opportunity to represent and advocate for our brilliant researchers as they work to improve outcomes for patients.”
Professor McShane commented: “Ellie is one of our most experienced academics and thoroughly deserves to have this important leadership role in our BRC. She has an impressive track record in patient-focused translational research and has played a central role in several BRC-supported studies, including controlled human infection model trials that could pave the way for hepatitis C vaccines, identifying those immunosuppressed people that are most at risk from COVID-19 after vaccination, and seeking to understand mechanisms for this that can be developed for improved treatments, early cancer detection, and more recently co-directing a major cancer prevention vaccine program.”
OUH Chief Medical Officer and Chair of the BRC Steering Committee, Professor Andrew Brent, said: “I am delighted to welcome Ellie to this important role. The BRC is central to so much of the high-quality translational research we are proud to support at OUH. I look forward to working with Helen, Ellie and the whole BRC Steering Committee as we deliver the remainder of the current BRC workplace and prepare our application for the next BRC.”