Get with the program: the molecular regulation of T cell death

Dr Timothy Patton is a Research Fellow within the Corbett laboratory, in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. He completed his PhD in 2020 at Monash University, where he developed a strong interest in cellular immunobiology, host-pathogen interactions, and the molecular mechanisms that govern immune cell fate.

His current research focuses on how inflammatory signals and availability of programmed cell death pathways shape T-cell activation, survival and function, with a focus on unconventional T-cell populations, including mucosal-associated invariant T cells. By combining a multi-omics approach alongside molecular and cellular assays of signalling and cell death pathways, his research has examined how apoptotic and inflammatory cell-death machinery regulates T cell survival, and how the perturbation of these pathways influence immune function.

More recently, his research has expanded to consider how T cells interact with and respond to bacterial pore-forming toxins, with the aim of defining the molecular features that determine differential susceptibility to membrane damage and lysis across T cell subsets. Collectively, his work seeks to understand how intrinsic cell death programs and extrinsic microbial insults converge to shape T cell fate during immune responses.