Daniel Davis

Summary

Daniel M. Davis is the Head of Life Sciences and Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London. Prior to this he was Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester. He was also The Director of Research in the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research - a research institute funded by the University of Manchester, AstraZeneca and GSK. Having gained a doctorate in Physics, Davis went to Harvard University to research the human immune system, becoming a Professor of Immunology at age 35 in Imperial College London.

Davis helped pioneer the nanoscale biology of immune cell recognition by employing various fluorescence techniques, including early uses of fluorescence lifetime microscopy, fluorescence recovery after photo-bleaching and super-resolution microscopy. Through direct observation of molecular recognition by immune cells, Davis made major contributions to establishing that immune cell recognition is not controlled by a simple cascade of protein-protein interactions as previously envisaged. His research showed that immune cells interact with their target cells through a series of elaborate steps: adhesion, integration of signals from activating and inhibitory receptors, assembly of an immune synapse, movement of the cell’s microtubule organising centre and the mitochondria, restructuring of cortical actin, release of effector mediators including exosomes, detachment of immune cells and subsequent engagement to other targets. Each step enables a discrete point of immunological regulation and crucially, is a potential target for medical intervention.

Davis often speaks at science, literary and music festivals. On radio and TV he adeptly communicates immunology to the public. Davis has written for the Times, Guardian, New Scientist and Scientific American and authored three books. His most recent book, The Secret Body: How the New Science of the Human Body Is Changing the Way We Live received endorsements from Bill Bryson, Tim Spector, Alice Roberts, Brian Cox, Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan and many others, and was a finalist for a Prose Award by the Association of American Publishers. His previous book, The Beautiful Cure: The New Science of Human Health, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2018 and was described by Henry Marsh as ‘one of the best accounts I have yet come across of the nature of biological science and discovery’ and by Stephen Fry as ‘one of those books that makes you look at everything human in a new, challenging and thrilling way’. His first book, The Compatibility Gene, was longlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize, shortlisted for the Society of Biology book prize and described by Bill Bryson in the Guardian’s Books of the Year as ‘elegantly written and unexpectedly gripping’. He is the author of 145 academic papers, collectively cited over 14,000 times, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.