Prof Teresa Lambe

UCD Alumni Award in Science

BSc 1997 PhD 2002

Teresa Lambe is an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator in the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford. She completed her graduate studies at University College Dublin, Ireland, before continuing her post-doctoral training in 2002 under the guidance of Prof. Richard Cornall and Prof. Sir John Bell at the University of Oxford, moving to the Jenner Institute in 2009. 

Her chief research interests involve collaborative ‘team science’ approaches to move from basic insights to globally impactful healthcare interventions against emerging and outbreak pathogens, in the shortest possible time. Her specific areas of expertise include zoonotic disease description and clinical trial assessment of interventions, and she continues to work on vaccines against globally important diseases including Ebola, Influenza, Nipah, MERS, and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever.  

She is one of the Principal Investigators overseeing the University’s COVID-19 vaccine programme. In January 2020, she co-designed the vaccine before leading the pivotal pre-clinical studies required to allow clinical trials to commence in April 2020. She then played an integral role during the clinical trials overseeing the immunological assessment of vaccine responses and supporting regulatory approval of the vaccine in late 2020. The vaccine has now been delivered to nearly half a billion people worldwide and has played a pivotal role in the fight against the virus.