Vanessa Sancho-Shimizu

Vanessa Sancho-Shimizu is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Reader in the sections of Paediatrics, Infectious Diseases and Virology, investigating the human genetic basis of life-threatening infections. She was awarded her PhD from McGill University, Canada, in 2007, studying Human Genetics at the Centre for the Study of Host Resistance to Infectious Disease. She then moved to Paris as a Marie Curie Fellow at Necker Enfants Malades Hospital/Université Paris Descartes, under the supervision of Professor Jean-Laurent Casanova, developing expertise in single-gene disorders underlying childhood herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE). She joined Imperial College London in 2012, extending this work to other severe childhood viral infections and invasive meningococcal disease (IMD), and started her own group in 2014. She became a Lecturer and was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2019, Senior Lecturer in 2021, and Reader in 2023. Her lab has elucidated the first genetic aetiologies of chi