I ran my first marathon in 2013 to raise money for MS Australia and since then have completed seven marathons.

As I learned more about how the immune system is controlled, it became clear that there were lots of potential ways that we could devise to control immune responses. Multiple sclerosis (MS) can be such a devastating disease, so I have always been interested in identifying ways to control immune responses so that MS could be treated better or even stopped entirely.

The development of disease modifying therapies for MS patients that can block immune cell migration into the central nervous system (CNS). These amazing therapies stemmed from findings from basic research into the molecular mechanisms of cell migration in model systems and seeing them successfully translated into clinically important immunotherapies for MS patients has been incredible.

We have been investigating how different cell types involved in the immune response work together to promote inflammation in responses that are relevant to MS. We have found that a cell type called neutrophils interacts with cells called T cells to promote inflammatory functions of the T cells in a model of MS. This was an unexpected finding as we do not normally expect neutrophils to control T cell function. We now want to find out how neutrophils are doing this and identify the molecules and mechanisms involved. We hope that this will lead to us identifying ways in which we can block neutrophils from promoting inflammatory T cell responses and that this might be a way to switch off inflammation in MS.

We hope this research will answer fundamental questions about how cells of the immune system work together during an immune response and lead to identification of new targets that we could test whether they could be used to block inflammation in MS. We would hope this could lead to better treatments for MS in future.

I most enjoy the daily process of discovery and testing ideas in the lab. The days when we find out the answers to the big questions we have been asking are the most rewarding. The biggest challenges are juggling all the commitments involved and obtaining funding for the research.