Ajit Lalvani is Chair of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Health Research Senior Investigator and Wellcome Senior Clinical Research Fellow at Imperial College London and Founding Director of the Tuberculosis Research Centre. He is Co-Chair of Respiratory Infections at the National Heart and Lung Institute and Honorary Consultant Physician at Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. His research programme addresses the world’s most serious respiratory infections: tuberculosis and pandemic influenza. Ajit qualified in medicine from the Universities of Oxford and London followed by specialty medical training in London, Cambridge, Basel and Oxford. Following his doctoral thesis on Immunity to Intracellular Pathogens as MRC Clinical Research Fellow at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, he developed his research programme in the Nuffield Department of Medicine as Clinical Lecturer and has been a Wellcome Senior Clinical Research Fellow since 2001. In 2007 he was recruited to Imperial College London to formulate new scientific and public health strategies to tackle tuberculosis globally. At Imperial, he founded the multidisciplinary Tuberculosis Research Centre, one of Europe’s leading tuberculosis research groups. The Centre is an intellectually stimulating environment comprising a thriving community of post-doctoral scientists, clinical training fellows, research nurses, graduate students, technicians and undergraduates, located within the Respiratory Infection Section of the National Heart and Lung Institute.

Respiratory medicine