Fighting influenza in a warming world: How heat shapes immunity

• Honours
• Masters by Coursework
• PhD

Humanity’s drive for progress has come at a cost – the health of our planet. Rising global temperatures and increasingly frequent heatwaves are creating new challenges for human health, yet their impact on the immune system remains poorly understood.

In this project, students will investigate how heat stress alters immune function and susceptibility to influenza infection using controlled temperature models. They will gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge techniques including flow cytometry, mouse infection models, and single-cell transcriptomics to uncover how climate-related stress reshapes immune responses.

This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to emerging research at the intersection of climate change and human health while developing valuable skills in modern immunology. The findings could help inform strategies to protect vulnerable populations in a warming world.

This project is open to students in the CareerTracker, Metcalf Scholarship and Medical Student Research Internship programs.

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century, with rising temperatures threatening human health worldwide.

The immune system sits at the interface between the environment and disease, yet the effects of climate-related stressors on immune function remain poorly understood.

Our team has established one of the first rigorously controlled murine heat-stress models, providing a unique platform to investigate how environmental change reshapes immunity.

We aim to uncover how climate stressors leave lasting cellular and molecular imprints that influence susceptibility to cancer, autoimmune diseases, and infectious diseases.

By combining immunology, systems biology, and single-cell technologies, we seek to define the mechanisms linking environmental stress to immune dysfunction and establish a new framework for understanding immune vulnerability in a warming world.

This project combines a robust heat-stress model, controlled heat-exposure systems, and innovative technologies to define how climate stress reshapes immune cell biology and drives new discoveries in climate immunology. Illustrations created with BioRender.com.