Rate My Professor Allison Tschirley

Allison Tschirley is an Assistant Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at the Dunedin School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Otago. Her research focuses on the immunological responses to papillomavirus infections, epigenetic modifications in viral genomes, extracellular vesicles in immune suppression, and the immune microenvironment in skin pathologies under immunosuppression.

Tschirley is first author on the 2021 publication in Viruses, 'The mouse papillomavirus epigenetic signature is characterised by DNA hypermethylation after lesion regression,' which details the hypermethylation of the mouse papillomavirus genome following lesion regression. She contributed to the 2025 Immunology article, 'Large extracellular vesicles from keratinocytes expressing human papillomavirus type 16 E6/E7 suppress Langerhans-like cell CD8+ T cell priming and IL-12 expression,' examining vesicles that promote myeloid-derived suppressor cell expansion from HPV16 E6/E7-expressing keratinocytes. Other key publications include 'An adverse response to cyclosporin A treatment in BALB/cJ mice' in Laboratory Animals (2023), reporting adverse effects in a mouse model treated with cyclosporin A; 'Characterisation of the immune microenvironment of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma in immunosuppression' in Experimental Dermatology (2022); and 'Skin antigen presenting cells and wound healing: New knowledge gained and challenges encountered using mouse depletion models' in Immunology (2021). These works, conducted in collaboration with researchers in the Department of Pathology, advance knowledge of host-virus interactions in papillomavirus-related skin conditions.