Jelena Bezbradica Mirkovic

I am Professor of Immunology at the University of Oxford and was previously a Career Development Fellow of the Kennedy Trust for Rheumatology Research (KTRR).

My research seeks to understand how macrophages use inflammasomes, inflammatory cell death, and intercellular communication to sense tissue damage and shape sterile inflammation. Using molecular, cellular, and in vivo approaches, we investigate how innate immune sensing pathways enable macrophages to detect tissue damage and coordinate inflammatory responses within tissues.

A major focus of our work is the NLRP3 inflammasome, a key regulator of sterile inflammation implicated in a wide range of inflammatory and age-associated diseases. We study how inflammasome activity and inflammatory cell death are regulated within tissues, and how these pathways contribute to tissue pathology and chronic inflammatory disease.

More recently, we have become interested in understanding how macrophages communicate inflammatory information to neighbouring cells. This work includes studies of CALHM6-dependent ATP signalling and other emerging mechanisms of intercellular communication that coordinate tissue-level inflammatory responses.

I obtained my PhD with Professor Sebastian Joyce at Vanderbilt University. I subsequently trained as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow with Professor Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale University and with Professor Kate Schroder at The University of Queensland before joining the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in 2016.