Daniela is a Senior Scientist at EIT, a Professor of Respiratory Infection and Vaccinology at the Oxford Vaccine Group in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford and the Director of the Liverpool Vaccine Group at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
She is a global leader in respiratory mucosal immunity and Controlled Human Infection Models (CHIM) with experience in respiratory challenge, co-infection studies, vaccine testing and immune responses. She leads a large Programme of work on Human Infection Challenge and mucosal immunity with collaborators from over 50 laboratories worldwide including South America and Africa and over £20M from various funders including BMGF, MRC,UKRI, NIHR and top global industry partners.
Daniela led the concept, funding and development of the Liverpool Human Challenge Facility, where she is currently the Scientific Director. To date her team has safely challenged over 2500 participants with live respiratory pathogens in over 30 clinical studies. Daniela has played a substantial role in the UK Covid-19 pandemic response including the leadership of the Liverpool’s STOP COVID response and the NIHR NWC Vaccine Alliance Liverpool and assisting on the clinical development of the Oxford/AZ vaccine.
Her research focused mainly on:
1) Accelerate development and testing of novel vaccines using controlled human infection models;
2) Decoding mucosal immunity and correlates of protection against diverse pathogens;
3) Defining how pathogen co-infections and host susceptibility (e.g. lung chronic disease, ageing) alters responses to infection and vaccination
Daniela is the co-founder and co-Director the HIC-VAC consortium and is the Lead of the WorkStream on Human Challenge Platform to accelerate product development in the UKRI Infection Innovation Consortium(iicon) consortium. She is a member of the UK DHSC Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.
Daniela obtained a PhD in Immunology in 2009 from the University of Sao Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil). During her PhD Daniela was awarded the prestigious Robert Austrian Research Award in Pneumococcal Vaccinology to develop novel nasal vaccines (2006). Daniela joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in 2009 as a postdoctoral scientist and was promoted to Professor in 2018 and was the Head of the Department of Clinical Sciences from 2018-2022. She joined the Department of Peadiatrics at the University of Oxford in June 2022.