Manu Shankar-Hari trained in Intensive Care Medicine in London, completed MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and did his PhD in Immunology at the Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology at King's College London, UK.

Manu was appointed as a consultant physician in Intensive Care Medicine at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in 2009. He was awarded the NIHR Clinician Scientist Fellowship in 2016 to investigate the long-term health consequences of sepsis survivors and to undertake a clinical trial of vaccinating to reduce long-term health care burden in adult sepsis survivors.

Manu was appointed to the Chair of Translation Critical Care Medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 2022.

Critical illness is a major cause of morbidity and mortality globally. Even for the two most common critical illness syndromes - sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) - there are no effective treatments other than supportive care.

My lab pursues the hypothesis that critical illnesses reflect perturbations within intracellular and intercellular networks that link cells, and organ systems. Illness networks arise from functional interdependencies between the molecular components within human cells. Many of these illness networks are causal and determine clinical phenotypes.

Thus, my lab's two focussed research themes of immunobiology and epidemiology converge to a core aim of determining these observable and treatable immunological abnormalities in critical illness (treatable traits).

The immunobiology focus of my lab are the phenotypic and molecular changes in T and B lymphocytes during critical illness and resolution from critical illness, to determine modifiable changes that could improve patient outcomes. This information is used to design seamless early to late phase human randomised clinical trials to translate immune system changes into treatments for patients using systems immunology principles.