Parks College

Research Themes: Interdisciplinary science, Computational Immunology, Cellular Dynamics, Inflammatory Disease, Application of the 3Rs

Professor Mark Coles graduated with a BSc (Honors and Distinction) in microbiology from Cornell University (NY, USA) in 1992.  He then went on to complete his PhD in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley with Prof. David Raulet.  His research focused on Natural Killer cell receptor expression and function on T lymphocytes.  He undertook postdoctoral training with Prof. Dimitris Kioussis at the National Institute of Medical Research, London, investigating mechanisms leading to lymph node and thymus formation and function.

In 2006 he moved as a lecturer to the Centre for Immunology and Infection at the University of York focusing on stromal immunology to identify stromal cell formation and function in human and murine lymph nodes and tertiary lymphoid tissue using fluorescent lineage reporters.  In 2007 he initiated an on-going collaboration with Prof. Jonathan Timmis in the Electronics Department to apply computational and mathematical modelling to understand immune function.  He founded and co-directed the York Computational Immunology Laboratory.  Through this work he has been a passionate advocate for novel 3Rs based approaches in immunology.  In 2016 he was promoted to Professor of Immunology with a joint appointment in the Department of Biology and Hull York Medical School.

In 2017 he moved from York to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology were his groups use interdisciplinary approaches from single molecule imaging to multi-scale computational modelling to identify novel methods to therapeutically target immune mediated inflammatory disease.  He works closely with Prof. Christopher Buckley to support the Arthritis Therapy Acceleration Program.  In 2018 he was appointed as the Director of Graduate Studies.

In 2014 he co-founded Simomics Ltd to develop in silico virtual disease laboratories to reduce and replace the need for pre-clinical animal models in therapeutic discovery and development and de-risk clinical trial design for immune mediated inflammatory disease, tumour immunotherapy and toxicology testing.  In 2016 he co-founded Lightox Ltd a light-based therapy company.