Nationality: British
Position: Respiratory physician and mucosal immunologist, Professor of Experimental Medicine, Imperial College, London
Research fields: Lung immunology, RSV, received a lifetime achievement in work on RSV research (Chanock prize, US, in 2012)
ESWI member since 2008
Peter Openshaw is a respiratory physician and mucosal immunologist, studying how the immune system both protects against viral infection but also causes disease. He has worked on RSV and influenza since the mid-1980s, leading a large Wellcome Trust funded national collaboration: Mechanisms of Severe Acute Influenza Consortium MOSAIC (2009-12), recruiting cases of severe influenza during the influenza pandemic of 2009-2010.
He has run studies of human experimental infection of volunteers for over 12 years and is Director of the MRC-funded HIC-Vac consortium established to promote the use of human experimental infection to accelerate vaccine development for pathogens of high global impact. Furthermore, he served as President of the British Society for Immunology (2013-18) and is a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences–British Society for Immunology expert taskforce on the immunology of COVID-19.
He has been a member of SAGE (2009-12), Chair and now vice-Chair or NERVTAG, a Department of Health committee horizon-scanning for emerging respiratory threats. He is a member of the UK Vaccine Network and several committees and Boards that oversee research on the immunology of respiratory infection.
He is Theme Lead for Infection at the Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Respiratory Infections Section Head within the National Heart and Lung Institute and an NIHR Senior Investigator. He co-leads ISARIC4C, a UK-wide consortium established in 2020 to study the COVID-19 pandemic.
