Laurence Macia

Laurence Macia is a senior research fellow at the faculty of medicine of the University of Sydney and is a group leader at the Charles Perkins Centre. Laurence is a raising star in her field with a successful NHMRC project grant, regular invitation to present her work nationally and internationally and published over 25 articles in journals such as Nature Communication, Immunity and Nature Reviews Immunology in less than 10 years. Her research interest is the manipulation of diet to modulate gut microbiota and improve inflammatory diseases.

Laurence obtained her PhD in 2006 at the Pasteur Institute of Lille in France where she was interested in understanding the inter-relation between metabolism and immunity. She then did her post-doc at the Garvan Institute in the eating disorder group, aiming to characterize the effect of peptides affecting feeding behaviour on the immune response involved in the development of type 2 diabetes in mice. She was after that hired as a research fellow at Monash University in the lab of Charles Mackay to study the impact of diet on the development of Western diseases.