Elizabeth Clare Mills

Elizabeth Clare Mills serves as Professor and Honorary Chair in the Division of Immunology, Immunity to Infection and Respiratory Medicine at the University of Manchester. She is based at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and collaborates with the Respiratory and Allergy Research team at the University Hospital of South Manchester led by Professor Adnan Custovic. Prior to joining Manchester in 2011, she worked at the BBSRC Institute of Food Research (IFR) in Norwich, where she became head of the Physical Biochemistry Group in 1999 and later led the food material science research program.

Professor Mills holds a BSc Hons in Biochemistry from the University of Bristol and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Kent at Canterbury. Her career spans academic research and translational applications, with significant contributions to food science and allergy research. She has developed a transdisciplinary research approach that bridges physical sciences with clinical medicine.

Her research focuses on understanding the relationship between biophysical properties of proteins and polysaccharides and their structural behavior during digestion, particularly why certain foods like peanut are more allergenic than others. She investigates how food processing, thermal denaturation, and food matrices affect allergenic activity, using proteomic approaches and mass spectrometry. Her molecular-level understanding of food allergens has led to the development of new profiling tools for allergen detection in foods.

Professor Mills has secured major international funding including the EuroPrevall project (spanning 17 countries with 63 partners) and the €9M iFAAM project (38 partners), representing the largest funding blocks ever awarded for food allergy research. She founded the Manchester Food Allergy Network (MFAN), comprising approximately 30 global companies, and co-founded Reacta Biotech Ltd where she serves as Founder Director and Chief Scientific Officer.

• 2005-2010: EFSA Self-task Food Allergy working group of the GMO panel
• 2006-present: Food Standards Agency Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes
• 2008-2012: BBSRC DRINC Steering Group
• 2009-2011: BBSRC Committee C Core Panel Member

Her extensive research portfolio demonstrates significant contributions to food allergy science with applications spanning from basic molecular understanding to clinical diagnostics and food industry practices. Professor Mills has established herself as a leader in transdisciplinary approaches to food allergy research, bridging gaps between physical sciences, clinical medicine, and food industry applications through her international collaborations and translational work.