Dr Sumaira Hasnain
Dr Sumaira Hasnain is a Senior Research Fellow at Mater Research and leads the Immunopathology Group.
Sumaira heads up a team of eight researchers and has an interest in chronic inflammatory diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis, inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes as well as infectious diseases.
Sumaira was the first globally to demonstrate that immunity can modulate protein production in secretory cells in infection and chronic inflammatory diseases. Her long-term vision is to characterise these novel immune factors and manipulate them therapeutically using pre-clinical models of immune-driven pathologies.
She holds a patent for targeted immunotherapy of a specific immune factor in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Sumaira has had a rapid upward trajectory in research, evident by extensive body of high quality publications (over 24 papers) in well recognised scientific journals.
She has been awarded around $3 million in competitive funding and has won 17 scientific awards including the Jared Purton Award from the Australasian Society for Immunology, Mater Research Strategic Grant for Outstanding Women in 2017 and was awarded a Career Development Fellowship for 2018.
Sumaira is well recognised in the field and has delivered many international conference presentations (including the Gordon Research Conference on Cilia, Mucus & Mucociliary Interactions (USA) & European Association for the Study of Diabetes (UK) in 2017.
She currently serves on the Australasian Society for Immunology National Council as the Queensland representative.