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Contact information


oliver.bannard@ndm.ox.ac.uk


+44 (0) 1865 222663

Oliver Bannard

PhD

Group Leader, Associate Professor

  • Wellcome Senior Research Fellow

Development of humoral immunity in germinal centres

My research has focussed upon investigating how adaptive immune responses are mounted following immunisation and during infection. I completed my PhD in 2009 with Professor Douglas Fearon in Cambridge and I was a postdoc with Professor Jason Cyster at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). I have been a group leader in Oxford since 2015. 

Our group is interested in determining the events and processes that lead to the generation of effective humoral (antibody-mediated) immune responses. Our major focus is the germinal centre reaction. These are specialised structures in which activated B cells evolve their antibodies through iterative random mutagenesis and selection, thereby enhancing how well they bind their cognate antigen (known as antibody affinity maturation). Germinal centres are also responsible for generating the long-lived memory B cells and plasma cells that confer immunological memory and protect from infection/disease.