Dr Shahriar Behboudi

After completing his undergraduate studies in Veterinary Medicine, Shahriar was trained as an immunologist and vacconologist in Uppsala, Sweden, where he studied the adjuvant activity of saponin-based nanoparticles. As a postdoc at University of Oxford, he was involved in assessing immunogenicity and efficacy of viral vector vaccines against infectious diseases. At University College London, Shahriar set up an independent line of enquiry with the aim to develop T cell based immunotherapy against primary liver cancer and pancreatic cancer. Since 2013, Shahriar has been group leader at the Pirbright Institute and his research program focuses on exploring host-pathogen interaction, immune evasion and vaccine development against avian alphaherpesvirus. His most recent research activities focus on identification and characterization of chicken NKT cells and their role in resistance and suscpetibility to infectious diseases in poultry.

The specific goals of Shahriar’s group are:

• To develop efficacious vaccines or immunisation strategies against infectious diseases in chickens.  
• To identify regulatory mechanism by which avian pathogens escape immune control 
• To determine the role of conventional and non-conventional T cell immunity, including chicken Natural Killer T cells.

Shahriar’s lab has developed many tools to study immunity in chickens, including cell transfer, epitope mapping for chicken CD4 and CD8 T cells, identification of lipid ligands for activation of chicken NKT cells in CD1-dependent manner, and means of enumerating effector and memory chicken T cells against avian pathogens. We have also established a reproducible model for Marek’s disease virus infection in chickens.