Eleanor Barnes

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Eleanor Barnes is a British doctor who works at the John Radcliffe Hospital and is a Professor of Hepatology and Experimental Medicine at the University of Oxford. She studies hepatitis C and vaccines, and she is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She also leads hepatology for the NIHR Clinical Research Network.

Barnes has long been drawn to science. She studied medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and earned an additional degree in anthropology and philosophy. After training as a liver specialist, she pursued research, even doing unpaid work to win a Medical Research Council fellowship. Her PhD at Oxford looked at T cells and dendritic cells. Her work focuses on how T cells work and how to apply lab findings to patient care. She was an MRC Senior Fellow at Oxford and later led hepatology in Thames Valley. She explored why about 80% of hepatitis C patients become chronically infected and found that the T cell response helps determine the outcome, which informed a T‑cell vaccine using adenoviral vectors carrying hepatitis C proteins. There are seven major Hepatitis C strains, which makes vaccine development challenging. In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. During the COVID-19 pandemic she studied vaccine design and effectiveness and noted that COVID-19 can affect the liver. She is married with two children.