Dr Shahriar Behboudi

After completing his undergraduate studies in Veterinary Medicine, Shahriar was trained as an immunologist in Uppsala, Sweden. As a postdoc at University of Oxford, he was involved in assessing immunogenicity and efficacy of viral vector vaccines against Malaria and TB. 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. In 2013, Shahriar was recruited to The Pirbright Institute to set up the Avian Immunology research group, and in 2017 he took up the joint position of Senior Lecturer in Veterinary Immunology, within the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Surrey, and group leader at the Pirbright Institute. Dr. Behboudi’s research at The Pirbright Institute focuses on exploring host-pathogen interaction, immune evasion and vaccine development. 

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.