Michelle M. Epstein

Michelle Epstein is a medical doctor graduated from the University of Alberta in Canada, who has specialised in Internal Medicine at the University of British Columbia and Allergy and Clinical Immunology at Yale University. She did post docs in basic immunology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Yale University with Kim Bottomly and at the National Institutes of Health, with Polly Matzinger. Her research is aimed at understanding the mechanisms of allergic disease from the perspective of a basic immunologist and clinical allergist. She has expertise with a variety of mouse models of asthma and materials science. Her lab focuses on the initiation and maintenance of allergic disease with a particular focus on T-helper 2 resident memory cells in the lung which perpetuate allergic responses to inhaled allergens that cause asthma. Additional projects in the area of food allergy and evaluating immune and allergic responses to biomaterials used for tissue regeneration. She is currently working at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria. She has coordinated or been a partner in several European Commission funded FP7 and H2020 projects, a member of the ImpARAS and COMFA - European Cost Actions and her laboratory has worked together with industry, e.g., Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim. She is currently with partners of the FoodEnTwin H2020 projects, 'Twinning of research activities for the frontier research in the fields of food, nutrition and environmental ‘omics' on the animal models of food allergy and the SUSINCHAIN project, 'SUStainable INsect CHAIN' on the allergenic potential of edible insect proteins and Imptox on the effects of nano- and microplastic particles on human health. Dr. Epstein chairs the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology - EAACI task force on Animal Models of Allergic Disease. She is currently a member of the European Food Safety Authority - EFSA GMO Safety Panel and Working Group on Feed and Food for which she helps assess the risks involved with allergenicity of novel GMOs. She was a member of the Scientific Committee on Emerging Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) at the European Commission (from 2013-2016 and a member of the working group on GMO Development of supplementary guidelines for the allergenicity assessment of GM plants at EFSA (https://ess.efsa.europa.eu/doi/doiweb/wg/680890) 2016-2017. She was Vice President of the Study Commission on Insects of The European Federation of Animal Science (EAAP) addressing the safety of adding insect proteins into the food chain. Dr. Epstein was the Editor-in-Chief of Drug Discovery Today: Disease Models. Dr. Epstein writes articles for The Metropole (www.Metropole.at), an English-speaking Media Outlet in Vienna, Austria as a public service to inform, educate and advise the public on a variety of topics linked to COVID-19.