Medical Mycology and Fungal Immunology MRes course, covering all aspects of medical mycology, immunity, the molecular basis of infection, and the genomics of infectious disease.
The MRC CMM welcomes expressions of interest from excellent researchers who wish to submit a Fellowship application to an external funder.
MRC Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter in partnership with St Georges’ University Hospital London and the UKHSA Mycology Reference Laboratory in Bristol designated as an ECMM Excellence Center Diamond Status 2023-2027.
The Centre
The Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology (MRC CMM) at the University of Exeter, recently relocated from the University of Aberdeen, is an internationally recognised world-leading centre of excellence in this field
The MRC CMM focuses on performing cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and on training the next generation of scientists to increase research capacity in this neglected field in the UK.
Despite their huge burden and high rates of death, fungal infections remain understudied compared with other infectious diseases and there is a pressing need for more research in this field. Experts in the field have identified three priorities that require urgent attention:
- To improve our ability to detect fungal infections, by developing robust, rapid, simple and cheaper diagnostics;
- To generate better, safer and more effective antifungal drugs;
- To enhance the understanding of fungal virulence and host antifungal immunity, and to exploit these discoveries to help tackle these devastating infections.
The limited progress in tackling these challenges is due, in large part, to a lack of basic and clinical scientists working in this field in the UK and worldwide. The UK has a small but highly active community of scientists working on fungal diseases (medical mycologists).
State of the art facilities at the University of Exeter
The University of Exeter facilitates opportunities for increased interdisciplinary activities for basic and clinical research, through Institutes such as the Living Systems Institute (LSI) which enables access to chemists, physicists and mathematicians for example. The University of Exeter has recently made significant investment in terms of the infrastructure and facilities required by the MRC CMM including the creation of a Cytomics Centre (with support staff and £2.3 million equipment budget) and two BSL2 animal research facilities (one of which is a quarantine unit allowing research to be performed directly on mice brought in from any external facility).
The MRC CMM is located on the third floor of the Geoffrey Pope building on the Streatham Campus occupying the entire third floor of a completely remodelled and modern space. It provides us contiguous laboratory and office spaces which are functionally shared and operates communally to stimulate interactions with embedded facilities such as our tissue culture, zebrafish facility, and microscopy suites, which we are currently expanding.
The Centre for Medical Mycology’s labs virtual tour
Take a virtual tour of the Centre for Medical Mycology’s labs, where our researchers make their ground-breaking scientific discoveries.