Professor Andrew McMichael came to Oxford to the Nuffield Departments of Surgery and Clinical Medicine in 1977 and started work on T cell immune responses to virus infections, first on influenza and then HIV. In 1986, Alain Townsend in his group showed that cytotoxic T cells recognised peptides derived from viral proteins presented by HLA class I molecules. This opened up a detailed understanding of how T cells respond to viruses, including HIV, and insights into how viruses escape from immune control. This work has led him to attempt to produce as AIDS vaccine that stimulates this kind of immune response, an alternative approach to most vaccines which stimulate neutralising antibody. The lecture will focus on the immune response to HIV and the vaccine programme.

Andrew McMichael has been Director of the MRC Human Immunology Unit since 1998 and of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine since 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1992.

Andrew McMichael was a Medical Student at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in 1966 when he first met Rodney Porter and went climbing with him in North Wales. In 1983 he joined him at Trinity College as a Professorial Fellow.