Dr Magdalena Flak

Magdalena B. Flak is a King’s Prize Fellow and Lecturer in Mucosal Immunology in the Centre for Host-Microbiome Interactions, where she and her group investigate the effects of host-pathobiont interactions on resolution mechanisms in chronic inflammatory disease.

Magdalena obtained a BSc and an MSc from the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg and the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics.

Her PhD research, under the guidance of Professor Iain McNeish at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), dissected the interactions between host cells and an oncolytic adenovirus to improve the efficacy of viral gene therapy and identify potential biomarkers in ovarian cancer.

After completing her PhD in 2010, Magdalena joined the laboratory of Professor Richard Blumberg at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, to study how the host and its microbiota affect each other in health and disease, such as inflammatory bowel disease.

In 2015, Magdalena returned to London and began working as a research fellow at the William Harvey Research Institute, QMUL, and was later awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship. During this time, she studied the link between rheumatoid arthritis and periodontal disease using models of inflammatory arthritis as well as in patients with recently diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis.