Robert Lechler PhD

Robert Lechler qualified in Medicine in Manchester in 1975. Thereafter, he undertook four years of junior hospital doctor training in general medicine and nephrology before embarking on a PhD in transplantation immunology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School. Following the PhD, he returned to full-time clinical work for two years and completed his scientific training at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA. He returned to the UK to a Senior Lecturer Post at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in 1986 and became Head of the Department of Immunology in 1994. He became Dean of Hammersmith Campus at Imperial College Faculty of Medicine in 2001 and Head of the Division of Medicine in 2003. He moved to King's College London as Head of the School of Medicine at Guy's, King's College and St Thomas' Hospitals in September 2004 and was appointed Vice Principal (Health) at King's College in October 2005. In June 2009 he was appointed as Executive Director of King's Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre. He continues to direct a research group in transplantation immunology and his research group has three major interests: (1) Defining and exploiting the mechanisms of transplantation tolerance (2) Regulating coagulation as a mechanism to inhibit inflammatory and adaptive immune responses (3) Defining the "fingerprint" of clinical transplantation tolerance