About
Associate Professor Severine Navarro is a Children’s Hospital Foundation Fellow and spokesperson to the Woolworth Centre for Childhood Nutrition Research. The focus of her research is the development of hookworm protein-based therapeutics for the treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases such as allergy, asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases and mood disorders. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University in Cairns, where she identified and characterised hookworm-derived immunomodulatory compounds showing efficacy in experimental asthma and colitis, and presenting high translational potential.
She completed her tertiary education and obtained her first research experience in the USA at the Florida Institute of Technology and The University of Montana. She has obtained her PhD with high honours in 2010 at the Universite de Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, France where she used different approaches to induce and recruit regulatory T cells to the airways and suppress allergic inflammation. Prior to her PhD, she obtained a Master’s degree in Developmental Biology, Genetics and Immunology from the Universite de Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, France and based her thesis on the visualisation in vivo of peptide/MHC II complexes at the surface of antigen presenting cells.
Area of Interest
Associate Professor Navarro’s Mucosal Immunology Group focuses on the development and the validation of novel therapeutic strategies for the prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases of the airway and the gut. Her interest lies in the manipulation of the microbiome to promote regulatory cell function and control inflammatory processes and tissue repair. The team’s strength is their integrative approach to the characterisation and understanding of the microbiome-mucosal-immune cross talk in both pre-clinical and clinical systems.