Professor John Fraser
Professor John Fraser, a graduate of Victoria and Auckland Universities, did postdoctoral research with Jack Strominger at Harvard before returning to New Zealand in 1988 to the first NZ Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. He is currently Dean of the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Auckland.
John’s research has focused on the modus operandi of bacterial superantigens, beginning with a seminal Nature paper in 1989, in particular the structural features of superantigens that make them so potent. With the advent of microbial genomics and the DNA sequencing of multiple bacterial genomes, his work has broadened to examine other potent pathogenicity and virulence factors whose genes are clustered in pathogenicity islands.