Rate My Professor Simon Keely

Professor Simon Keely holds the position of Professor in the Discipline of Immunology and Microbiology within the School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy at the University of Newcastle, part of the College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing. He obtained his PhD from University College Dublin, Ireland. His career includes postdoctoral research at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University College Dublin, and extensive training at the Mucosal Inflammation Program, University of Colorado Denver, where he served as Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Instructor, Senior Instructor, and Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America Research Fellow from 2005 to 2011. In 2011, he joined the University of Newcastle as an academic in Immunology and Microbiology, advancing to Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health in 2017. Currently, he leads the Gastrointestinal Research Group at the Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI), directs the HMRI Immune Health Program, and is a Chief Investigator in the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Digestive Health. He serves on the NHMRC Grant Review Panel and is a member of the Australian Society for Immunology and the Gastroenterological Society of Australia.

Professor Keely's research focuses on the immunopathology of functional gastrointestinal disorders including irritable bowel syndrome and functional dyspepsia, host-microbiome interactions in gastrointestinal diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, microbiome-gut-brain interactions, diet-immune-microbiome interactions in Crohn's disease, the role of the microbiome in tissue healing post-colorectal surgery, and the influence of peri-operative management on colorectal cancer immunology. His fields of research encompass innate immunity (30%), cellular immunology (30%), and gastroenterology and hepatology (40%). He has authored over 130 peer-reviewed articles and contributed to book chapters such as "Isolation and in vitro culture of human gut progenitor cells" (2019) and "The Gut-Brain Axis in Neuropsychopathology" (2018). Notable awards include the John Forte GI/Liver Plenary Award for Distinguished Abstract from the American Physiological Society (2014), Outstanding Paper Award - GI Response to Injury from the American Gastroenterological Association (2011), and Outstanding Paper Award from the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America (2009), along with a Research Fellowship from the same foundation (2009).