Daniela Ferreira

Daniela is a Professor of Respiratory Infection and Vaccinology at the Oxford Vaccine Group in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford and the Director of the Liverpool Vaccine Group at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Daniela is a global leader in respiratory mucosal immunity and Controlled Human Infection Models (CHIM) with experience in respiratory challenge, co-infection studies, vaccine testing and immune responses. She leads a large Programme of work on Experimental Human Pneumococcal Challenge and mucosal immunity with collaborators from over 50 laboratories worldwide including South America and Africa and over £20M from various funders including BMGF, MRC, UKRI, NIHR and top global industry partners.

She is also the Director of the Liverpool Vaccine Team based at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. To date her Liverpool-based team has safely challenged over 1800 participants with live pneumococcus in over 30 clinical studies conducted in their bespoke Accelerator Research Clinic. Daniela has played a substantial role in the UK Covid-19 pandemic response including the leadership of the Liverpool’s STOP COVID response and the NIHR NWC Vaccine Alliance Liverpool. Her Liverpool-based team was a trial site for several covid vaccine studies including the Phase II/III of the Oxford/AZ vaccine.

 Her research focused mainly on:

 - Accelerate development and test novel respiratory vaccines using controlled human challenge.

- Understanding nasal and lung immune responses and correlates of protection against respiratory infection with bacteria (pneumococcus) and viruses (SARS-CoV2, RSV and influenza).

- Defining how co-infections and host susceptibility (e.g. age, lung chronic co-morbidity) alters responses to infection and vaccination.

Daniela is on the management board of the HIC-VAC consortium and is the Lead of the WorkStream on Human Challenge Platform to accelerate product development in the UKRI Infection Innovation Consortium (iicon) consortium.

Daniela obtained a PhD in Immunology in 2009 from the University of Sao Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil). During her PhD Daniela was awarded the prestigious Robert Austrian Research Award in Pneumococcal Vaccinology to develop novel nasal vaccines (2006). Daniela joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine( LSTM) in 2009 as a postdoctoral scientist and was promoted to Professor in 2018. She was the Head of the Department of Clinical Sciences at LSTM from 2018-2022. She joined the Department of Peadiatrics at the University of Oxford in June 2022.