Calliope Dendrou

Calliope Dendrou is an Associate Professor in Clinical Pathology and Inflammation at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology (KIR) where she leads the Immune Disease Multiomics Laboratory. She previously held a Wellcome & Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship to start her group in 2017 at the Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, where she was also the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champion, before moving to the KIR in 2023. Calli graduated with a BSc in Biology (Honours and Forbes Memorial Medal Winner) at Imperial College London in 2005. She then completed her Wellcome PhD in Infection & Immunity in 2010 at the University of Cambridge in the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, under the supervision of Professors Linda Wicker and John Todd FRS. She subsequently moved to Oxford to undergo postdoctoral training at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Professor Lars Fugger’s group (Oxford Centre for Neuroinflammation).

Calli’s research career began in the field of immunogenetics, where she performed seminal genotype-to-phenotype studies investigating key immune disease-associated genes including IL2RA, TNFRSF1A, and TYK2. Calli’s current research focuses on investigating shared molecular circuits and cellular mechanisms across tissues and across immune-mediated diseases. Her group uses high-resolution genomic profiling technologies to help elucidate cross-disease pathophysiology, particularly as pathological drivers may evolve over time and may change due to environmental influences and therapeutic intervention. Her research aims to identify ‘hubs’ that may be targeted therapeutically via drug repositioning approaches, with an especial emphasis on cytokine signalling pathways.

She is also the Data Analysis Lead for several large-scale collaborative projects including the Oxford-J&J Cartography Consortium and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LEGACY Network, and enjoys teaching on the MSc in Genomic Medicine programme, which she previously co-directed, as the ‘Single-Cell & Spatial Omics for Precision Medicine’ Module Lead.