Kylie Quinn

Dr Kylie Quinn is an RMIT University Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow and leads the new Ageing and Immunotherapies Group. Her group is developing ways to improve immune responses in older individuals during infection, vaccination, and new cell-based therapies such as chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy (CTT). CTT can achieve remarkable remission rates in haematological cancers. Unfortunately, this efficacy can be reduced in older patients, as their immune cells are more difficult to activate. Her work aims to identify what limits this activation of immune cells and to remove that barrier for older patients. Previously, she trained at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC), NIAID/NIH, USA with Dr Robert Seder. At the VRC, she defined the mechanism of action for several novel vaccines and provided key pre-clinical data for Ebola vaccine selection by the World Health Organisation in 2014. She has received several awards for her work, including the John and Eileen Haddon Award for Geriatric Research from the Rebecca L Cooper Foundation and the Maxwell Eagle Endowment Award for Cancer Research at RMIT. More broadly, Kylie has a long-standing interest in issues of equity and inclusion in science and is the current Australia and New Zealand Society of Immunology Women's Initiative Coordinator.