Andrew S. Flies (scholar profile)
Cheetah staring down Andy in the Maasai Mara
How I ended up where I am
My bachelor’s degree was in computer science, with concentrations in math and chemistry. After completing a six month internship as a software engineer, I decided to make a career change. I then started my immunology career as a laboratory technician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I then moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland with Dr. Lieping Chen. While living in Baltimore I began my ecology training by enrolling in masters level courses in the evenings and on weekends in the Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Program for Environmental Science and volunteering for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER. I subsequently completed a dual Ph.D. in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Behavior at Michigan State University (2013).
I next moved to Adelaide, Australia and worked at the University of South Australia (UniSA) whilst my wife, Emily Flies, was completing her PhD there. Watch her award winning 3-minute thesis (viewed over 5 million times) here.
In 2014, I was awarded a 2-year Morris Animal Foundation postdoc fellowship to develop monoclonal antibodies that bind Tasmanian devil immune checkpoint proteins (DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2016.00581; DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2017.00513). In July 2015, Emily, our son Morialta, and I moved to Hobart, Tasmania to work at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania to do research on the Tasmanian devil immune system and try to understand how the devil facial tumour (DFT) disease evades the immune system.
In 2018, I was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher (DECRA) 3-year fellowship to work on a vaccine for DFT1 and DFT2. Around this time, I began playing a central role in a growing community of Wild Immunologists by coordinating a special journal issue: Wild Immunology – The answers are out there. In 2019, I co-organised the inaugural Wild and Comparative Immunology (WACI) workshop in Hobart, Tasmania. This resulted in our Rewilding Immunology article in Science.
In 2019, we officially launched our ambitious project to make an oral bait vaccine to DFT1 and DFT2 (10.1080/14760584.2020.1711058).This project has steadily gained momentum and we are currently working our way through regulatory permits/license applications to perform our first vaccine trials in captive devils.
In 2024, I was awarded a 4-year ARC Future Fellowship. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to work with an amazing team to see if we can help recover a healthy wild devil population.
Current lab members
Ruth Pye (veterinarian/PhD) – scholar prolife
Dr Ruth Pye is a veterinarian from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. She first became interested in transmissible cancers while working for a street dog sterilisation program in India. The program’s core work was desexing dogs and vaccinating them against rabies, but any dogs with canine transmissible venereal tumours were also treated. Ruth moved to Hobart in 2013 to start a PhD project with the Tasmanian devil immunology group at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania. She played critical role in previous vaccine trials led by Prof Greg Woods. She has worked as a research veterinarian two days per week since completing her PhD. Ruth was the first to publish natural DFT1 regression in the wild, was a co-author on the first immunotherapy-induced DFT1 regression, and discovered DFT2.
Chrissie Ong (PhD) – scholar profile
Chrissie first joined the team as an 3rd year undergraduate student. She then went on to complete a 1st class honours project with the team before completing an excellent PhD that resulted in four first author publications (DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2018.03117; DOI: 10.0.3.239/s00432-021-03601-x; DOI: 10.1098/rsob.220208; DOI: 10.1111/pim.13062). After a one-year research stint in Queensland, Chrissie rejoined the Wild Immunology team and helps lead the team by providing hands on guidance in the lab and supervising numerous students.
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