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Simon Mackenzie
Evolutionary biology of the innate immune response integrating behaviour, immunity and nanotechnology toward improving health in aquaculture. I have a track record in biomedicine, comparative biology and over the past 10 years aquaculture working both in academic and commercial environments. Commercial activities have included vaccines, diagnostics and biomarker assay development. I approach this with an integrative suite of methods both experimental and theoretical spanning across the fields of behavioural ecology, evolution and immunity. This is underpinned by the application of state of the art genomic techniques including transcriptomics (RNA‐Seq/microarray) and more recently whole genome sequencing supported with a proven bioinformatic strategy for assembly, annotation, analysis and network modelling. Throughout my career to date my major academic interest has become to explore how immunity has evolved and recently how environmental conditions, particularly temperature, modulate the plasticity of the immune response. To this end I have applied a multi‐level approach reaching from genomics to cellular and system function to personality and population. I have a strong background in fish immunology and health and a particular interest in host regulation of Pathogen Associated Molecular Patterns (PAMPs) perception, particularly for gram‐negative bacterial PAMPs. Here I am much in favour of a ‘systems’ style approach aiming to understand regulation of ‘defence modules’ in the vertebrates. To this end I have developed a number of both in vivo and in vitro experimental models in various fish and bird species.