Investigating the mechanisms of regulatory T-cell differentiation in vivo by novel Fluorescent Timer reporters

Dr Masahiro Ono was originally trained as a dermatologist, and later specialised in molecular and systems immunology. He obtained his PhD in 2006 on autoimmunity and regulatory T cells, and thereafter, worked on the molecular mechanism of the transcription factor Foxp3, revealing the interaction of Foxp3 and the transcription factor Runx1 and their transcriptional mechanisms. In 2009, he obtained a Human Frontier Science Program Long-Term Fellowship, and joined University College London (UCL). Thus he extended his expertise to genomics and systems analysis, establishing a new multidimensional framework for visualising transcriptomic data and unravelling complex processes in T cell differentiation. In 2012, he was awarded a prestigious Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) David Phillips Fellowship, thereby established his lab in UCL. In 2015, he was appointed to a proleptic Senior Lecturer in the Department of Life Sciences, Imperial. He is conducting multidisciplinary projects on the transcriptional programme of T cell memory and immune regulation.