Biography
Dr Thomas O’Neil is an expert in the use of multi-omic technologies to investigate disease states in human tissues, especially viral transmission. His PhD focussed on investigating human anogenital T cells and their interactions with HIV. Positioned within the Westmead Health Precinct, his research makes exclusive use of human tissue freshly discarded from surgery to investigating viral immune cell interactions and inflammatory bowel disease.
Thomas has expertise in isolating immune cells from human tissues, phenotyping immune cells by high parametric flow cytometry, generation and analysis of single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, numerous cutting edge spatial transcriptomic (Xenium, Visium, CosMX) and proteomic (imaging mass cytometry) platforms & bioinformatic analyses.
Thomas was awarded his PhD in 2023 and has authored 14 manuscripts in high impact (e.g. including Immunity (co-first author), Nature Communications, Cell Reports) and specialist journals (e.g. Cytometry A (first author), PLoS Pathogens (co-first author, iScience). In the last 3 years he has won 5 international travel awards.
Research interests
HIV, Immunology, Virology, Tissue Resident T cells, Bioinformatics
Additional information
Thomas studies all aspects of human tissue immunology using high parameter bioinformatic approaches. Recently, he has been developing and applying analytic methods to investigate immune cells in inflamed and uninflamed human tissues using spatial technologies (IMC, Cosmx & Visium) and is particularly interested in describing lymphoid follicles in rectal tissues as early sanctuaries for pathogens during viral transmission.
Projects:
- Investigating the initial immune interactions with pathogens in human mucosal tissues; Determining the initial productive and latent reservoir in human tissue resident CD4 T cells.
