Olivia Thomas

Olivia completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham UK with Prof Alan Rickinson, Dr Jill Brooks and Dr Graham Taylor where she studied adaptive immune responses to EBV in MS and their potential to target CNS antigens. This works identified cross-reactive T cell clones which target both EBV EBNA1 and MOG. In 2017, she joined the lab of Prof Lars Fugger at the University of Oxford where they investigated the interaction of EBV immune responses with protective MS genetic variants. In 2020, she moved to Karolinska Institutet to join the labs of Prof Tomas Olsson and Prof Hans Grönlund where she has continued research on EBV-specific immunity in the context of MS. In 2023, they discovered that EBNA1-specific antibodies target the heat shock protein alpha-crystallin B, and they are now investigating the role of cross-reactive T cell responses to EBV in neuroinflammation.