Manu is the Chair of Translation Critical Care Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

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 was on B cell biology in sepsis at the Spencer lab, Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology at King's College London, UK.

Manu's NIHR Clinician Scientist Fellowship investigated the long-term health consequences of sepsis survivors and included the first clinical trial of vaccinating to reduce long-term health care burden in adult sepsis survivors.

For the last decade Manu has focussed his research on a concept for which he is a global pioneer: improving care for critically ill patients (especially those with sepsis) could be achieved by integrating the clues from multiple domains within the immune responses with clues from patient's clinical features to enable better targeting of treatments.

Manu's lab pursues the hypothesis that critical illnesses reflect perturbations within intracellular networks 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 observable and treatable immunological abnormalities in critical illness (treatable traits).

The immunobiology focus of Manu's lab are the phenotypic, functional and molecular changes in T and B lymphocytes during critical illness, resolution from critical illness, and long-term reprgramming of immune cells following critical illness/ treatments during critical illness - i.e., translate immune system changes into treatments for patients using systems immunology principles.