Associate Professor Holly Chinnery is the inaugural Ian Constable Research Fellow at the Lions Eye Institute.
Associate Professor Chinnery was awarded her PhD in 2008 (topic- corneal immunology) at the University of Western Australia (UWA), jointly supervised by Professor Paul McMenamin (then at the UWA) and Professor Eric Pearlman (UCLA, Irvine). Associate Professor Chinnery completed post-docs at the Lions Eye Institute and Monash University before starting her own research group in Corneal Immunology at Deakin University in 2011, and in 2013 joined the Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences at The University of Melbourne. Her laboratory at the Melbourne Brain Centre has been mostly funded by the NH&MRC and ARC since 2013 (career total of $2.85M).
Associate Professor Chinnery’s research activities focus on understanding how the corneal nervous and immunological systems interact in the context of homeostasis, inflammation, injury and neurodegenerative diseases. Using preclinical models to investigate fundamental ocular immunology as well as novel therapies to treat corneal neuropathy and inflammation, her research program is designed to model conditions affecting the human ocular surface.
Together with her collaborator Associate Professor Laura Downie, Associate Professor Chinnery co-leads the FrontTear Research Centre www.fronttear.au which uses in vivo and ex vivo confocal imaging techniques to visualise and monitor dynamic immunological signatures in the mouse and human eye. Associate Professor Chinnery is currently involved in the supervision seven PhD students, most of whom are members of the FrontTear research centre.
