I am a comparative immunologist with an interest in animal health and vaccination in farmed animals. Throughout my career I have been involved in the development and efficacy testing of a variety of vaccines in teleost fish and ruminants as well as their effect on the immune system with a focus on the adaptive immune responses and cytokine production. My career as a researcher started more than 16 years in the Scottish Fish Immunology Research Centre at the University of Aberdeen where I carried out my doctoral studies under the supervision of Prof Chris Secombes. After completing my PhD in 2006 I continued working in the field of Fish Immunology for 6 more years during which I discovered a variety of cytokines in gadoid fish and carried out the first vaccination and challenge experiments in the UK against the bacterial pathogen Vibrio anguillarum. For the last 6 years my research has progressed onto the study of the immune system of ruminants. Initially at the Roslin Institute, I characterised the monocyte populations of the peripheral blood of cattle and sheep, and was able to show an increased presence of a non-classical monocyte population during Mycobacterium infections in cattle. I was also involved in the identification of cross-reacting antibodies against the Th17 cytokine IL-17A. I am currently working at the Moredun Research Institute as part of the large NERC grant "The ecology within: The impact of gut ecosystem dynamics on host fitness in the wild". This project addresses fundamental unanswered questions about how the interactions between hosts and their gut microbial, protozoan and helminth communities shape host population dynamics and parasite epidemiology in the wild. Our study system will be the Soay Sheep from St. Kilda resident to the Village Bay area on Hirta within the St Kilda archipelago. These sheep have been captured and uniquely marked within a few days of birth and monitored closely throughout their lives for the last 30 years. At the Moredun, we will be focusing on the interaction between parasite community and the immune responses of these sheep in an attempt to understand how the dynamics of the gut parasite population are shaped by the variation in the host immune phenotype and how this is associated with host fitness.