Brian Dixon

Professor Brian Dixon was born in Whitehaven Castle in northern England. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and his MSc from the University of Guelph. His PhD thesis examined immune responses to parasites of fish and seals and was carried out at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dr. Dixon received a scholarship from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada to be a postdoctoral fellow at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and another from the Medical Research Council of Canada to be a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in California. Currently a professor of Biology at the University of Waterloo, Dr. Dixon was the recipient of a Premier’s Research Excellence Award from the Province of Ontario, is the Canada Research Chair in Fish and Environmental Immunology and was given a 2014 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Synergy award for collaboration with the aquaculture industry. His work focuses on fish immunity and the influence of environmental factors, such as temperature on fish immune systems, the development of diagnostic assays for assessing fish health status, antimicrobial peptides and applying fish immunology research to improve aquaculture production worldwide. His recent work focuses on understanding the mechanisms of antigen presentation and coinfections in fish.