Associate Professor Severine Navarro
Associate Professor Severine Navarro is a Mucosal Immunologist with expertise in Immune Tolerance, and Chronic Inflammatory Diseases such as asthma, food allergy, celiac and inflammatory bowel disease. They have an international educational and professional background with their undergraduate studies completed in Florida USA, and a junior researcher position in immunotoxicology at the University of Montana. Associate Professor Navarro has obtained a Masters and PhD in France at the Institut de Pharmacologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire. They completed their postdoctoral training at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine (James Cook University), where they demonstrated the role of gastrointestinal pathogens in promoting tolerance, modulating the gut microbiome, and educating the immune system. Associate Professor Navarro has also performed a training fellowship at the TWINCORE Zentrum für Experimentelle und Klinische Infektionsforschung, Hannover, Germany. They are a Children’s Hospital Foundation fellow since 2017 and were appointed Team Head at QIMR Berghofer in 2018 to lead the Mucosal Immunology Group. Their research program combines fundamental, clinical and commercial research.
Associate Professor Severine Navarro's main research activity focuses on the design and validation of novel immunotherapeutic approaches to induce mucosal tolerance. Projects are looking at different sources of immunomodulatory agents, such as:
Parasite-derived products from hookworms secreted/excreted compounds and Schistosoma mansoni egg antigen-derived exosomes
Dietary metabolites
Microbiome-derived Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMVs).