Rate My Professor Rachel Thomson

Professor Rachel Thomson is a Professor in the University of Queensland Medical School and Head of the Greenslopes Clinical Unit at Greenslopes Private Hospital. She holds the qualifications MBBS, Graduate Diploma in Clinical Epidemiology, PhD, and is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP). As a Thoracic Physician and Respiratory and Sleep Physician, she provides expert clinical management for patients with nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) pulmonary disease at Pulmedica, Greenslopes Private Hospital, public clinics at The Prince Charles Hospital and the MetroSouth Clinical TB service at Princess Alexandra Hospital, and via telehealth across Australia. Patients under her care can access novel treatments through clinical trials in both private and public sectors. Additionally, Professor Thomson maintains a special interest in respiratory problems of elite athletes, including asthma management, vocal cord dysfunction, and compliance with national and international doping organization requirements for asthma medications.

Professor Thomson possesses an international reputation in the field of pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacterial disease. Her research examines immunological and environmental aspects of susceptibility to NTM infection, characteristics of the lung and gut microbiome in NTM disease, and methods to enhance treatment outcomes. As Director of Research for the NTM Research Group, her work addresses how mycobacteria persist in environments such as water, soil, and house dust, mechanisms of human infection, disease causation, and antibiotic resistance development. Current projects include investigations into NTM associations with climate change and weather events, maintenance of a Mycobacterial Biobank for studies on macrophage defects, genetic factors, and the gut-lung axis. She has secured major funding, including NHMRC Project Grants for emerging NTM infections and Mycobacterium abscessus management, ARC Linkage Projects for biofilm pathogens in plumbing systems, and support from the Gallipoli Medical Research Foundation and Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. With 154 publications cataloged from 1998 to 2026, notable works include "The geographic diversity of nontuberculous mycobacteria isolated from pulmonary samples: an NTM-NET collaborative study" (European Respiratory Journal, 2013), "Emergence and spread of a human-transmissible multidrug-resistant nontuberculous mycobacterium" (Science, 2016), and "The Rise of Non-Tuberculosis Mycobacterial Lung Disease" (Frontiers in Immunology, 2020). Professor Thomson supervises doctoral students on topics such as the gut-lung axis in NTM pulmonary disease and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis transmission. She is frequently invited to present at international and national meetings.