Constance Finney

Biography

Dr Constance Finney is an infectious disease immunologist who has always focused on host parasite interactions. Dr Finney obtained her BSc (Hons) in Biology from Imperial College London, with a year spent working for GlaxoSmithKline in the clinical virology department. She then earned a PhD in immunoparasitology at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on immune responses to intestinal worms. Her post-doctoral training in malaria and HIV, was undertaken at the Universities of Toronto and Calgary, with time spent in Kisumu (Kenya).

Dr Finney joined the University of Calgary’s Biological Sciences Department in 2012. Her work now focuses on studying polyparasitism (multiple concurrent infections), and its impact on immune responses and therapeutics. She aims to:

-          Determine how underlying chronic infections affect immune responses to new infections.

-          Assess how diagnosis/prevention/treatment of diseases is affected by these changes in immunity.

-          Determine what we can do to improve the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases in the context of polyparasitism.

Current projects within her group involve studying:

1. The impact of the Heligmosomoides polygyrus worm infections on innate immune responses to the single-celled intracellular parasite Toxoplasma gondii.
2. The impact of HIV on cancer-causing HPV infections.