Fern is an ARC DECRA fellow at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, at The University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD with Professor Dale Godfrey in 2017 for which she received the departmental QIAGEN PhD Award, the Zoetis PhD Oration award, and the Victorian Government Premier’s Award for Health and Medical Research (Basic Science) on identifying, characterising and mapping thymic development of an immune cell type called MAIT cells. More recently Fern has secured competitive NHMRC and ARC Early Career fellowships to continue her research, extending upon innate-like T cell development, homeostasis, subsets and their functional diversity, with a view to harness these unconventional immune cells in a variety of disease settings and immunotherapies.
