Jaclyn Pearson

Biography

Dr Jaclyn Pearson is a microbiologist by training. She currently holds a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Peter Doherty Early Career Research Fellowship and is a Research Group Head in the Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases. Dr Pearson completed her PhD research in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne in 2013. She was awarded the Chancellor’s Prize and Dean’s Award for Excellence in a PhD Thesis in 2013, and in 2014 attained a NHMRC Early Career Fellowship. Here, she was appointed group leader for research on pathogenic E. coli within the Hartland Research Group at The Peter Doherty Institute where she continued her research to decipher the mechanisms by which gut pathogens cause disease and how the human host fights bacterial infections. In 2017, she was recruited to her current position at Hudson Institute of Medical Research.   Dr Pearson has been the recipient of numerous awards including the inaugural Australian Society for Microbiology’s Jim Pittard Early Career Researcher Award (2016), the Victorian Premier’s Award for Health and Medical Research for which she was the first-ever female recipient (2014), and The Victoria Fellowship (2010). In 2014, she was also shortlisted for the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Infectious Diseases Research along with her mentor Professor Elizabeth Hartland. Dr Pearson is an active member of local and national networks and committees that support the professional development of early and mid-career researchers and has had numerous invitations to deliver motivational talks to students and ECRs.  

Research Interest

The major focus of Dr Pearson’s research is understanding host programmed cell death signaling and inflammatory responses during bacterial gut infection. Dr Pearson will interrogate these mechanisms using the model organism Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium. Her research has uncovered highly novel mechanisms of immune evasion by bacterial pathogens, which has provided fundamental insights into how a host combats infection. Her work has been published in internationally renowned journals such as Nature,Nature Microbiology and PLoS Pathogens.