Associate Professor Sophie Valkenburg is a laboratory head of viral vaccine immunology based at the Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne since 2022. She is a long-term alumnus of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne, completing her PhD in 2012 in the Doherty laboratory with Professor Kedzierska on structure based virus escape of CD8+ T cell immunity. She spent 10 years in Hong Kong, and was a post-doctoral fellow with Professor Leo Poon on universal influenza vaccines, and went on to become an independent laboratory head at the HKU-Pasteur Research Pole since 2016.
Her research program is devoted to investigating correlates of protection, specifically T and B cell responses, antibody quality and function for influenza viruses and SARS-CoV-2 from patients, randomised control vaccine trials and animal models. Her program aims to define broadly reactive immune correlates from recovered patients, and how current vaccines stimulate or fail to stimulate these protective immune responses, and incorporated to next generation universal vaccines for robust immunity.
