Professor Adrian Liston

The Unit's Affiliated Memberships aim to facilitate or enhance long-term collaborations between scientists and experts from across the world with the MRC Toxicology Unit and its groups. Affiliated Members are linked to a group and provide the Affiliates with access to the Unit, its expertise and wider opportunities, making them highly valued members of the Unit's research community.

Adrian Liston is Professor of Pathology at Department of Pathology. Liston trained at Adelaide University before a PhD at the Australian National University, and a post-doc at the University of Washington, with additional degrees in Higher Education and Public Health. Liston started his career as an independent researcher at the VIB and University of Leuven in Belgium, where he ran a lab with Dr James Dooley for 10 years (2009-2018) before moving the lab to the Babraham Institute in 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, the Liston-Dooley lab worked on biotechnology developments in neuroinflammation, developing new therapeutic approaches and setting up a spin-off company Aila Biotech Ltd. In 2023, the Liston-Dooley laboratory relocated to the Department of Pathology, where Liston took up the position of Professor of Pathology. Liston currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Immunology & Cell Biology.

Liston has extensively worked in the cellular control over immune/tolerance switches, and how molecular defects in these switches can lead to pathologies ranging from autoimmunity and primary immunology to diabetes and neuropathology. By researching a broad range of pathologies, and using both patient samples and animal models, Liston’s research is able to identifying the common cellular pathways to pathology. The laboratory has made extensive contributions to the fields of neuroimmunology, autoimmune genetics, diabetes, primary immunodeficiencies, systems immunology, thymus biology and regulatory T cells. Liston has been awarded the Francqui Chair, the Eppendorf Prize and fellowship to the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of Biology.