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[MH]  Dr Martina Johansson: Mucosal immunology of the genital tract (with Nils Lycke).

Martina (Tina) Johansson is a post doctoral researcher in the Department of Clinical Immunology at Göteborg University in Göteborg, Sweden. She graduated in Molecular Biology in 1995. In the following years, she worked in the group of Nils Lycke at Göteborg, in collaboration with the webmaster. Her studies of the role of T and B cells in the development of protective immunity against genital infection were unique at the time both for the range of knock out animals used and because she worked with a human rather than mouse isolate of Chlamydia trachomatis. She convincingly demonstrated the key importance of CD4+ T helper 1 cells and of interferon g in the protective immune response to chlamydial genital tract infection.  In 1999 she successfully defended her PhD thesis "Experimental studies of local immunity in the female genital tract with special reference to Chlamydia trachomatis infection".

In 2000-2001 she was a post doctoral researcher with Dr Sarah Robertson at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the University of Adelaide in Australia where she studied the induction of foetal tolerance, another fundamental aspect of female genital tract immunology.

In 2002 Tina returned to the Department of Clinical Immunology at Göteborg University to continue working with Nils Lycke on the immunology of the genital tract mucosa and the development of vaccines against Chlamydia trachomatis genital tract infections.

[MEW adds: an excellent graduate student who achieved a lot and made a key contribution to understanding of protective immunity to chlamydial infection. Her results with human C. trachomatis were a little different to those of US workers working with the less clinically relevant C. muridarum, but she has been entirely vindicated. It is excellent for the field that she is back working on chlamydial infections, even if the Swedish climate is less attractive than that of Adelaide  ;-)  ].