Elissa Deenick, Ph.D., assistant professor, University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

A/Prof Elissa Deenick is head of the Lymphocyte Signalling and Activation Laboratory at UNSW Sydney/Garvan Institute of Medicine, and honorary secretary of the Australasian Society for Immunology. Deenick undertook her Ph.D. at the Centenary Institute/University of Sydney with Phil Hodgkin. She then moved to Toronto, Canada to work with Pam Ohashi at the University of Toronto/Ontario Cancer Institute. She returned to Sydney in 2007 and is now an associate professor and Scientia Fellow at UNSW Sydney, and a lab head and member of faculty at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. Her interest is in how lymphocytes integrate signals to generate appropriate protective immunity and how this goes wrong in disease. In particular, her group studies both patients with monogenic immunodeficiencies as well as mouse models of these conditions to dissect the intracellular signaling pathways that control lymphocyte differentiation and survival.