The five-year NRF Investigatorship, which she received in December 2023, aims to give scientists and researchers the opportunity to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk research. Each award cycle supports a small number of excellent principal investigators whose track record marks them as leaders in their fields. Assoc Prof St John is one of eleven recipients from the ninth NRF Investigatorship call.

“I am very honoured to be given this award and opportunity because this specific grant is designed to fund highly innovative research. I appreciate the vote of confidence from the selection committee that the work coming from my research group is pushing boundaries and will generate new knowledge,” said Assoc Prof St John.

In 2020, Assoc Prof St John received the NUS Young Researcher Award, in recognition of her standing as one of the top researchers in the field of immunology. Described then as a “brilliant young scientist”, she has been studying immune responses to viral infections, pursuing research projects with significant translational impact.

Building on this work, Assoc Prof St John will use the award to advance understanding of how the immune system reacts to foreign materials.

“I expect that at the end of the five years of support, my lab will have important and unexpected new insights into how our immune system recognises foreign materials, which I hope will have implications for how we design vaccines for both infectious diseases and cancers,” she said.