Dr Joana Neves

Joana Neves is an immunologist who has been studying innate effector lymphocytes such as gamma delta T cells, Natural Killer T (NKT) cells and Innate Lymphoid cells (ILC) and their interactions for the past 10-years. Joana obtained her Licenciatura (4-year BSc) in Biochemistry at Porto University, Portugal in 2006. Has part of those studies Joana worked 6-months at the Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BRC), Szeged. On the same year, Joana was selected for the PhD Programme in Experimental Biology and Biomedicine (PDBEB) in Coimbra, Portugal and on the following year moved to London to develop her PhD project studying the thymic development of ?? T cells with Professor Dan Pennington, at the Blizard Institute, QMUL, in collaboration with Dr Bruno Silva-Santos, IMM, Lisbon. In 2011, Joana moved to Boston to work with Dr Richard Blumberg, at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, identifying the protective role of  CD1d dependent intestinal epithelial-derived IL-10 in colitis. Joana returned to London in 2014 to join King's. Here Joana started by working with Professor Graham Lord as Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow and has now established her own independent research group. Joana and her team aim to understand how the different cellular compartments of the gut – including immune, epithelial and microbial cells – communicate with each other, to then be able to direct those conversations to promote gut homeostasis. The Neves lab is particularly interested in studying those interactions in the context of intestinal associated diseases such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). By working with a combination of human and mouse models, the Neves lab commitment is to accelerate the translation of its discoveries for the benefit of all.