Peter Cockerill

Peter Cockerill is a professor within the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences. He has spent his career engaged in research using chromatin structure analysis as a tool to investigate gene regulation in the fields of molecular immunology and leukaemia. Peter was previously a professor at the University of Leeds from 2000 to 2011, and ran a research group in Australia before that.

Peter has published omany research papers in scientific journals as well as reviews and book chapters in the fields of molecular immunology, leukaemia and chromatin structure. He has received major grants from Blood Cancer UK, the BBSRC, the MRC, the AICR and YCR.

His research aims at defining mechanisms that control the development and activation of the immune system, and how these mechanisms are hijacked in leukaemia. These studies use the combined approaches of investigating chromatin structure in parallel with analyses of the DNA elements that control gene expression. This has allowed the group to develop a comprehensive picture of the detailed mechanisms that allow cytokine genes to become activated in a tissue-specific manner in response to immune stimuli.

Peter now runs a joint lab together with Professor Constanze Bonifer, and over the last several years they have worked together to perform genome-wide analyses of gene regulatory networks in the immune system and in acute myeloid leukaemia.