Vanessa Sancho-Shimizu

Vanessa Sancho-Shimizu is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Reader in the sections of Paediatrics, Infectious Diseases and Virology, investigating the human genetic basis of life-threatening infections.

She was awarded her PhD from McGill University, Canada, in 2007, studying Human Genetics at the Centre for the Study of Host Resistance to Infectious Disease. She then moved to Paris as a Marie Curie Fellow at Necker Enfants Malades Hospital/Université Paris Descartes, under the supervision of Professor Jean-Laurent Casanova, developing expertise in single-gene disorders underlying childhood herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE). She joined Imperial College London in 2012, extending this work to other severe childhood viral infections and invasive meningococcal disease (IMD), and started her own group in 2014. She became a Lecturer and was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2019, Senior Lecturer in 2021, and Reader in 2023.

Her lab has elucidated the first genetic aetiologies of childhood herpes encephalitis, critical COVID-19 disease, and invasive meningococcal disease, focusing on rare genetic variants that affect responses to viral or bacterial infection, including interferon, TLR signalling, autophagy, and other pathogen recognition pathways. She helped establish a BRC-funded Paediatric Infectious Disease clinic at St Mary's Hospital to recruit otherwise healthy patients presenting with life-threatening infections, and her lab uses patient cell-based assays, including iPSC-derived neuronal cultures and cerebral organoids, to identify and characterise new inborn errors of immunity.

She is a Satellite Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute, an elected member of the Henry Kunkel Society, and a steering committee member for the international COVID Human Genetic Effort (COVID-HGE), co-leading its MIS-C genetic taskforce.