Our people

Professor Jason Tye-Din is head of the Coeliac Research Laboratory at WEHI and a gastroenterologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. His expertise spans the immune mechanisms of coeliac disease, clinical care of gluten-related disorders, diagnostic discovery and pre-clinical and clinical drug development. His work aims to improve the health and quality of life of people suffering gastrointestinal immune diseases, particularly those caused by gluten and other foods.

Professor Tye-Din is a Principal Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Honorary Research Fellow at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and is involved in multiple leadership and advisory roles, including to the World Health Organisation and industry.

As a recognised leader in immunology and translational science, Professor Tye-Din’s research has been widely published. Most recently, he led the development of a ground-breaking blood test that has the potential to transform the way coeliac disease is diagnosed.

Professor Paul Lyons guides the team of scientists and clinicians at the Snow Centre to create a research environment that will facilitate groundbreaking research into real-world clinical applications. With over 20 years of experience at the University of Cambridge, Professor Lyons is well-equipped to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and clinical impact.

Professor Lyons is experienced in investigating how genetic variations influence the immune system and contribute to disease development, as well as genomic approaches to the study of autoimmune disease.

Professor Lyons was involved in the establishment of the Cambridge Hinxton Centre for Translational Research in Autoimmune Disease – aimed at applying expression profiling to the clinical management of autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus and small vessel vasculitis.

Dr Bertleff-Zieschang is an experienced STEM and medical research leader with more than 10 years’ experience across research, program management, centre operations, governance, stakeholder engagement and cross-institutional collaboration.

Dr Bertleff-Zieschang has a proven ability to establish governance and operating frameworks, manage complex research programs, oversee budgets and workforce planning, and align diverse stakeholders around strategic objectives.

Dr Bertleff-Zieschang brings deep scientific training, international translational research experience and a strong commitment to building high-performing, collaborative teams that advance health outcomes through innovation and research translation.

Dr Vanessa Bryant’s team at WEHI investigates how genetic and cellular variation shapes immune health, with a focus on rare and complex immune disorders.

The lab combines clinical genomics, functional immunology and single-cell technologies to uncover mechanisms driving immune dysregulation. Their work has identified novel causes of rare antibody deficiency, directly enabling personalised treatments for children and adults with immunodeficiency.

Dr Bryant co-leads the MRFF-funded Australian Immunogenomics Alliance (AIGA) and leads the Victorian node of ALIGN (Australian Alliance for Indigenous Genomics) (ALIGN).  By linking these insights to clinical outcomes, Dr Bryant and her team aim to transform diagnosis, treatment selection and disease monitoring for people with rare and complex immune diseases.

Dr Mark Dowling is a clinical haematologist within the CAR-T stream at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Royal Melbourne Hospital, and a clinician scientist within the Centre of Excellence for Cellular Immunotherapy (CoE CIT) Translational Laboratory.

With support from a Victorian Cancer Agency (VCA) mid-career fellowship, he is developing novel immunotherapy trials in lymphoma and myeloma.

Dr Dowling has a passion for translational research and is dedicated to improving outcomes for patients with blood cancer.

Professor Phil Hodgkin has helped transform understanding of immune regulation with innovative theories and novel experimental approaches. His mathematical models of immune responses provide the unique foundation for the Snow Centre research.

Professor Hodgkin’s research is focused on the problem of how immune cells process information and regulate outcomes. This has required inventing methods for integrating molecular and cellular dynamics to make predictions of immune function at multiple scales. He is the former President of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology.

Prof Phil Hodgkin is recognised as one of the pioneers of systems immunology.

Professor Daniel Gray’s team employs new genetic, single-cell, and imaging-based technologies to address how the immune system makes decisions in the context of autoimmune disease, infection, and cancer.

Professor Gray’s contributions have come through a mixture of large, collaborative, consortia-based research programs, as well as more focused, hypothesis-driven projects to make fundamental discoveries with translational impact. He is an international leader in how cell death processes impact lymphocyte responses and immunological tolerance: key goals of the modelling of molecular networks program.

Professor Stephen Nutt is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a world-leading expert in molecular immunology. He is a member of the international Immunological Genome Consortium.

Professor Nutt has made significant discoveries relating to the transcriptional processes required for immune cell development and differentiation. Professor Nutt’s research focuses on understanding how gene regulatory networks control cellular decisions in the immune system and how to target these processes with new therapeutic approaches. His leadership in these domains will propel the molecular networks and drug discovery programs of the Snow Centre.

Associate Professor Ashley Ng is the Snow Centre Digital Hub lead. He is also a clinical haematologist in the Clinical Haematology Department, The Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Clinical Informatics Lead in the Department of Health Services Research at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, and Clinician Researcher at WEHI.

At the Clinical Haematology Department, Associate Professor Ng is an expert in blood cell development, leukaemia research and leukaemia therapy. Associate Professor Ng is also a member of the acute leukaemia working parties of the Australasian Leukaemia and Lymphoma Group, where he is involved as a principal investigator for Phase I/II/III human clinical trials.

Dr Maseda is the Snow Centre Assay Hub lead. He is also an immunology scientist with extensive research experience in lymphocyte biology and autoimmunity. His past academic work focused on the development, manipulation, and functional enhancement of human immune cells for therapeutic purposes, with particular emphasis on autoimmune conditions and barrier-site pathologies. He is deeply committed to translating basic science into clinically actionable outcomes.