Scientist
Clare Margaret Lloyd FRSB FMedSci is a Professor of Medicine and Vice Dean for Institutional Affairs at Imperial College London. She investigates allergic immunity in early life.[1]
Early life and education
Lloyd earned her BSc and PhD in immunology at King's College London.[2] She earned her Bachelor's degree in 1987 and her PhD in 1991.[3] She was awarded a National Kidney Research Fund Fellowship and joined the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals.[2] Her work considered mouse models of glomerulonephritis. She joined Harvard University to work on chronic inflammatory glomerulonephritis.[2] She became interested in the mechanisms of cell recruitment. She was involved with early studies that looking at the cloning, expression and function of chemokine.[4] Her group demonstrated that T helper cells were the initial responders to CCR3 and CCR4 pathways, but the increase in CCR4 positive cells results in the long-term representation of T helper cells in vivo.[5] LLoyd studied the role of these chemokines in allergic lung inflammation.[6] She looked to better characterise the spatial patterns of chemokine expression to inform therapeutic strategies that limit the side-effects of allergen exposure.[6]
Career and research
After her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, Lloyd joined at Millennium Pharmaceuticals in 1996 to work on models to characterise novel genes.[2] She returned to the UK in 1999, joining Imperial College London as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow.[2] She continued her interest in allergens, looking at the roles for cells and molecules involved in pulmonary inflammation.[2] She is part of the Asthma UK Centre in Allergic Mechanisms of Asthma.[7] She is a member of the British Society for Immunology and Wellcome Trust Infection, Immunity and Immunophenotyping.[8] Lloyd studies the lung cells of children who suffer from asthma and severe wheeze.[9] She has studied why pollen and dust can trigger reactions in some people but not others.[10] She became interested in why exposure to allergens and infections in early life had such an influence on programming pathways to maintain pulmonary homeostasis.[11][12] She demonstrated that Interleukin 9 can mediate inflammation of asthma.[13]
She was appointed Professor in Respiratory Immunology in 2006.[2] She is co-lead of the respiratory division.[14] Her research group, the Lloyd Lab, look at the interactions between lung cells and infiltrating inflammatory cells.[15] Lloyd was awarded the Imperial College London Rectors Medal for her Research Supervision in 2014.[16] In 2018, she demonstrated that the ICOS/ICOS‐L pathway could be a therapeutic target in asthma.[17]
Academic service
She was the lead National Heart and Lung Institute Athena Swan lead between 2009 and 2014, achieving the first Silver award for a medical department in the UK.[18] She pushed for the improvement of the Imperial College London mentoring scheme, in an effort to support early career researchers.[18] In 2016 she was appointed Dean of Institutional Affairs at Imperial College London.[18] She serves on the scientific advisory board of Science Magazine and is an editor of Nature Mucosal Immunology and the European Journal of Immunology.[19][20][21] She serves on the Royal Society Newton International Fellowships board.[22]
Awards and honours
