Infection is a key barrier to child health globally. Exposure to infection in childhood is ubiquitous, with most exposures resulting in trivial illness requiring no treatment. For some children, however, an infectious exposure can result in severe and life-threatening illness. Moreover, the consequences of infection in children are commonly thought of in terms of death and disability directly resulting from an episode of severe infection. It is unclear, however, if there are long-term health consequences of repeated episodes of infection from which a child recovers. To better design control strategies for childhood infection, and to more fully predict their impacts, we need to understand why some children develop severe infections and what the consequences of infection are for long-term health. My group uses human genetic tools to address these questions. In this talk I will illustrate this with work exploring the human genetics of rotavirus infections in African children, describing how genetic variation shapes immune response and disease risk and how we can leverage this to define how infections may affect wider health outcomes.

James is a principal investigator in the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford and an honorary consultant in paediatric infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital in Oxford. He completed his PhD with Adrian Hill’s infectious disease genetics group in 2016, supported by a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellowship, performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of invasive bacterial infection in African children. He expanded on this interest during his post-doctoral training within a NIHR clinical lectureship, working with Ben Fairfax’s cancer immunogenomics group, developing an interest in mapping genetic regulatory variation in immune cells to better understand infection-associated genetic variation identified by GWAS. In parallel, his postdoctoral work also focussed on describing the epigenetic consequences of infection and inflammation in immune cells and understanding whether this is informative of longer-term health outcomes. He established his group within the Oxford Vaccine Group in 2025 supported by a Wellcome Career Development Award.