Our researchers - Professor Benny Chain

Professor Benny Chain obtained a PhD in comparative electrophysiology at the University of Cambridge, and then studied comparative invertebrate immunology at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York. He joined Prof. Av Mitchison at UCL in 1982, becoming Professor of Immunology in 1996, and holding a joint appointment in Computer Science as Professor of Computational Immunology since 2018. He holds a visiting professorship at the Weizmann Institute, Israel, working with the systems immunology group led by Prof. Nir. Friedman. 

Benny worked for most of his career on antigen processing and presentation by dendritic cells. In the last decade he has realigned his research program to exploit mathematical and computational approaches to make sense of the data explosion generated by the functional genomics revolution. His research focuses on using high throughput sequencing to analyse and model the T cell receptor repertoire, in order to understand and manipulate the immune response to HIV and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and to cancer.