James Gilchrist

I established my group within the Oxford Vaccine Group in 2025, supported by a Wellcome Career Development Award. Infection results in over 1.5 million childhood deaths in sub-Saharan Africa annually, and malaria alone causes 200 million episodes of clinical infection. We need better tools to control childhood infection but also a greater understanding of how repeated episodes of infection in childhood impact long-term health. Our group uses human genetic tools to better understand the causes and consequences of infection in childhood. Our work has two broad themes. Firstly, to understand why children develop invasive infection we use genome-wide association studies to map genetic variation associated with infection risk. We combine these studies with expression quantitative trait locus mapping in immune cells, in the context of infection, to understand the mechanisms through which genetic variation modifies infection risk. Secondly, we map epigenetic changes in immune cells to understand how childhood infection burden in turn modifies the epigenetic landscape and immune function. In doing so, we hope to understand whether repeated infection can modify risk of secondary infection in the short-term, but also whether childhood infection burden affects risk of non-communicable disease in adulthood. We address these questions in settings with a high burden of childhood infection, delivering our work through close collaborations with researchers in Uganda (MRC/UVRI & LSHTM Uganda Research Unit, Entebbe) and Kenya (KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kilifi).