Email: m.a.haniffa@ncl.ac.uk

Research profile and key clinical specialties

Professor Muzlifah Haniffa is a dermatologist with a research interest in immunology.

Her research programme is focused on understanding the functional heterogeneity of human mononuclear phagocytes, a family of white blood cells comprising dendritic cells, monocytes and macrophages, which initiate and regulate immune responses.

She has used functional genomics and comparative biology to align the human and mouse mononuclear phagocyte networks.

Muzlifah’s research goal is to understand how mononuclear phagocytes regulate tissue homeostasis, immunity upon vaccination and their role in disease pathogenesis.

This knowledge is essential for the development of new strategies to manipulate host immune response to improve vaccination and immunotherapeutic strategies.

Muzlifah was a previous recipient of a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellowship (2010-2015) and an Action Medical Research Training Fellowship (2005-2008).

Her work has been recognised by a number of awards including the Lister Institute Research Prize (2016).

Muzlifah is an adjunct investigator at Singapore Immunology Network and Institute of Medical Biology, A*STAR, Singapore.

She leads a Wellcome Trust funded public engagement programme called Inside Skin, an interdisciplinary dialogue between science and art relating to skin and the immune system in collaboration with the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and Culture Lab.

Two key publications

• Pallett LJ, Gill US, Quaglia A, Sinclair L, Jover-Cobos M, Schurich A, Singh K, Thomas N, Das A, Chen A, Fusai G, et al., Haniffa M, Maini MK. Arginase-dependent metabolic regulation of hepatic immunopathology by myeloid-derived suppressor cells. Nat Med.2015; 21(6):591-600.
• McGovern N, Schlitzer A, Gunawan M, Jardine L, Shin A, Poyner E, Green K, Dickinson R, Wang XN, Low D, Best K, Covins S, Milne P, Pagan S, Aljefri K, Windebank M, Saavedra DM, Larbi A, Wasan PS, Duan K, Poidinger M, Bigley V, Ginhoux F, Collin M, Haniffa M. Human Dermal CD14(+) Cells Are a Transient Population of MonocyteDerived Macrophages. Immunity. 2014 Sep 18;41(3):465-77.

Possible PhD projects

• Reconstructing an unbiased multidimensional atlas of the human skin.

More information

I am the lead supervisor for two PhD students. Co-supervised two Wellcome Trust Clinical Research training fellows.

Keywords: Dermatologist, dermatology, immunology, mononuclear, phagocytes, blood, cells, homeostasis, science, art, skin, Muzlifah, Haniffa, Newcastle

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