Prof. Karen English is currently a Professor of Immunology and group leader of the Cellular Immunology Laboratory in the department of Biology and the Kathleen Lonsdale Institute for Human Health at Maynooth University in Ireland. Prof. English was awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford working with Prof. Kathryn Wood at the Transplantation Research Immunology Group in 2009, before returning to Maynooth as HRB Translational Medicine Postdoctoral fellow in 2012 and an SFI Starting Investigator in 2015. Prof. English was awarded the Maynooth University Early Career Research Achievement Award and The Irish Research Council Early Career researcher of the Year Award in 2018.

Prof. English is the ISGCT secretary. Prof. English is a member of the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT) mesenchymal stromal cell committee and is a co-chair for the ISCT 2026 Dublin. Prof. English is a member of the Irish Society for Immunology (ISI) executive board where she serves as the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) lead. She is also a member of the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS) EDI taskforce and the co-chair of Maynooth University’s gender equality steering group.

Prof. English’s groups current research focuses on the translation of cell and gene therapies. The group has a long-standing interest in the mechanistic understanding of the therapeutic effects of mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC)-based therapy and the immune response directed against allogeneic cell and gene therapies. Prof. English is the Preclinical Immunology work-package lead in the Horizon Europe MAGIC project which aims to accelerate the development of gene therapies and genome editing strategies for muscular dystrophies.