Christopher Chiu | Professor of Infectious Diseases
Imperial College London

Prof Chiu is a clinical academic based at Imperial College London, whose work focuses on human immune responses against respiratory viruses, with particular interest in mucosal immunity to improve vaccines and therapeutics. Trained in clinical infectious diseases and immunology, he has built a research programme centred on experimental medicine infection and vaccine trials for influenza, RSV and coronaviruses. His group combines detailed clinical phenotyping with advanced immunology and multi‑omics, including single‑cell and spatial transcriptomics of respiratory tissues. He has defined how cross‑reactive memory responses shape protection, biomarkers of susceptibility and viral control, and protective factors against COVID-19. He undertook the first SARS-CoV-2 human challenge study and leads the CEPI-funded international MUSICC consortium that is building on this work. His research supports development of intranasal and inhaled vaccines, with key outputs in Nature, Science and elsewhere. Internationally, he is a member of WHO working groups on respiratory viruses, CEPI and EU pandemic‑preparedness initiatives, the ESCMID Global programme committee and several scientific advisory boards. Nationally, he sits on the JCVI RSV subcommittee and is a co‑lead of the NIHR Translational Research Collaborative in Infection & AMR. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, chairs DSMBs for clinical trials including the phase I-II ChAdOx1-nCov trials during the early pandemic and edits the Oxford Textbook of Medicine respiratory viruses chapter. Thus, he aims to accelerate broadly-protective and transmission-blocking interventions by integrating human challenge models, population cohorts and systems immunology, while building international capacity for translational research that accelerates their deployment.