Dr. Grainger undertook his MRes and PhD at the University of Edinburgh on the Wellcome Trust funded Molecular Basis of Disease programme. The focus of his PhD work was exploring mechanisms used by gastrointestinal worms to modulate the host’s adaptive immune system in order to improve their own survival. As part of these studies he identified a novel mechanism by which helminths secrete TGF-β homologues to suppress the inflammatory response. After his PhD John moved in 2009 as a visiting research fellow to the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, where he developed an interest in novel functions of innate immune cells during mucosal infection. In 2014 he returned to the UK to the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research (MCCIR) and was awarded a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society funded Sir Henry Dale fellowship to establish his own group. His group’s recent studies have predominantly focused on understanding the mechanisms responsible for training monocytes and macrophages in response to gastrointestinal parasite challenge; with the ultimate goal of identifying novel pathways that can be manipulated to improve patient outcomes in inflammatory diseases, such as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD).