Professor Milling is an immunologist, focussing on the biology of antigen presenting cells in the intestine, and on how these cells respond to infectious or inflammatory stimuli. He was trained at Imperial College, London, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Philadelphia and in Oxford. He moved to Glasgow as a Lecturer in 2007 and became a Professor in 2017. His team studies the functions of carefully-defined antigen presenting cell subsets in vivo, and the responses they induce from T lymphocytes, using samples from mice and from people. The aim of this work is to understand the vital roles that antigen presenting cells play, both in the induction and polarisation of adaptive immune responses against pathogens, and in the pathology of inflammatory diseases, especially ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, alopecia, and inflammatory bowel disease. He aims to use this information to manipulate the immune response, either to generate improved strategies for vaccination, or to inhibit inflammatory pathology.
