Thomas is a laboratory head at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity.  He has a background in clinical and experimental medicine and joined the University of Melbourne in 2005 as a postdoctoral fellow.  His team was amongst the first wave of researchers identifying “tissue-resident memory T cells” (TRM) as the T cell population that dominates immunity at body surfaces and pioneering their functional and transcriptional characterization. 

Together with national and international collaborators, his team also developed novel preclinical models of melanoma and metastatic disease.  Using these models, they recently identified CD8 TRM cells as key drivers of a durable melanoma-immune equilibrium in skin and described a multitude of MHC II-dependent contributions of CD4 helper T cells to melanoma immunity. The overall goal of his team is to better understand the role of T cells in health and disease and to develop immunotherapies that target T cells for improved clinical outcomes in infection, inflammation and cancer.