Laura Gleeson MRCPI, PhD

Laura graduated from Trinity College Dublin Medicine in 2010 and attained membership in the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (MRCPI) in 2013. She completed her Higher Specialist Training in Respiratory and General Internal Medicine in 2020, before embarking upon a Clinical Fellowship in Pleural Disease and Interventional Pulmonology in Imperial NHS Trust in London. Throughout her training, Laura was actively involved in translational medical research and was awarded the Health Research Board's (HRB) Health Professional Fellowship to fund her Ph.D. work examining the immunometabolic response of human macrophages to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection. Through this work, she demonstrated for the first time the centrality of glycolytic reprogramming in the early innate immune response to Mtb infection, and crucially demonstrated defects in this essential immunometabolic response in alveolar macrophages from smokers' lungs.

In 2023, she was appointed as Associate Professor in Clinical Medicine, at Trinity College Dublin, and Consultant Respiratory Physician at St James's Hospital. With the support of HRB funding through the Clinician Scientist Fellowship, she is exploring the role of safe, FDA-approved metabolic manipulators on the immunometabolic innate immune response to infection and the impact of macrophage ontogeny on metabolic and functional outcomes in infection, with a view to developing new treatments for TB and other respiratory pathogens. Laura is passionate about promoting clinical/scientific collaborations to promote truly transformative translational research that addresses questions that really matter and delivers solutions to the patient's bedside.