Claudia Monaco is Professor of Cardiovascular Inflammation at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and an Honorary Consultant Cardiologist at the University of Oxford NHS Trust. She trained as a Cardiologist (1998) and PhD (2001) with Professor Attilio Maseri at the Catholic University of Rome, Italy. During her PhD studies she moved to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Imperial College London to work with Professor Marc Feldmann. She became a Group Leader at the Institute in 2003 and moved to Oxford in 2013. She was privileged to get involved in the field of inflammation in atherosclerosis when it was still in its infancy with the identification of a cytokine-dependent systemic inflammatory response in patients with acute coronary syndromes. Her research later on demonstrated that human atherosclerotic disease shares features of persistent or chronic inflammation with classic inflammatory diseases, including the dysregulated production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and that such inflammation is dependent on the innate Toll-like receptors. Her group was the first to establish innovative experimental methodology for the isolation, culture and pharmacological targeting of live cells from human atheroma lesions. Our work allowed the elegant characterization of the inflammatory and synthetic properties of human atherosclerosis. Using this system and ex vivo biochemical approaches we demonstrated that the dysregulated inflammatory response in human atherosclerosis is driven by the extracellular sensor TLR2 and NFkB activation. We then showed that the endosomal receptors TLR3 and TLR7 mediate atheroprotection by exerting an unexpected anti-inflammatory effect. Hence, pattern recognition by TLRs could elicit both protective and detrimental effects in atherosclerosis and the outcome of TLR signaling depends on sensing patterns (extracellular vs. endosomal) and specific ligands present in the tissue. The Cardiovascular Inflammation Team is focused in dissecting the functions of pattern recognition receptors and their downstream signaling in the vasculature in health and disease. She won several prizes and awards including a Marie Curie EU Fellowship, the Young Investigator Award of the International Society of Thrombosis (1997) and the First Prize of the Young Investigator Award of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in the category Thrombosis (2002), and the Oxford-Harrington Scholarship (2015). She is a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology since 2007. Her lab has been funded over the years by several EU and BHF grants. Claudia is now Professor of Cardiovascular Inflammation at the University of Oxford and Hon. Consultant Cardiologist with a special interest in Echocardiography. She heads the Cardiovascular Inflammation lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology that recently relocated in a new building within the Old Road Campus in Oxford as part of the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences. She also heads the Mass Cytometry Facility at NDORMS.