Veterinary immunology has always been my area of interest. I completed my PhD in the area of bovine mammary gland host defence, which was a joint project between Ruakura Research Centre, AgResearch and University of Otago. The research highlight of the project was a novel ability of the cows’ milk RNases to promote the recognition of pathogen-derived nucleic acids.

During the final stages of my PhD, I joined the Infectious Disease team at the Hopkirk Research Institute, AgResearch, as a senior research technician (2012). Within the team, I mainly worked on understanding pneumonia in sheep and developing an effective vaccine for this disease.

After that I was awarded an AgMARDT post-doctoral fellowship in 2015 to develop a Johne’s disease (JD) vaccine. The project mainly focuses on to develop a biobead vaccine displaying a number of candidate antigens from Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis that can induce protective immunity without inducing an undesired tuberculin skin test reaction.

I also characterised microRNA profile in the sera of JD infected cattle to identify novel biomarkers for effective diagnosis of JD in cattle. Currently, we are taking this research further. As part of the infectious diseases team, I am also involved developing effective vaccine against pneumonia in sheep and understand host-pathogen interaction of Mycoplasma ovipenumoniae and sheep lungs by various approaches such as nanostring and flow cytometry. I am also involved in a project where the team is developing a vaccine against rumen methanogen.