Carola Vinuesa was born in Spain and obtained a medical degree at the University Autonoma of Madrid. She undertook specialist clinical training in the UK and in 2000 was awarded a PhD by the University of Birmingham. As the recipient of a Wellcome Trust International Travelling prize Fellowship, she did postdoctoral work at The John Curtin School for Medical Research (The Australian National University, ANU). Her work led to the discovery of genes important for immune regulation and memory and the identification of a novel pathway of posttranscriptional control of gene expression to prevent autoimmunity. Since 2006 she has been leading the Humoral Immunity and Autoimmunity Group at ANU first supported by a Viertel Senior Medical Research Fellowship and currently by an Elizabeth Blackburn NHMRC fellowship. Her group identified a critical role for follicular helper T (Tfh) cells in autoantibody-mediated autoimmune diseases and made significant discoveries into the function and transcriptional regulation of this cell subset. She has won several prizes including the 2008 Science Minister’s Prize (Life Scientist of the year), the 2009 Gottschalk Medal of the Australian Academy of Sciences, the inaugural CSL-Young Florey Medal and the 2015 Ramaciotti Medal for Excellence in Biomedical Research. In 2015 she was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. She is currently Professor of Immunology at the ANU and Head of the Immunology and Infectious Disease Department. Since its launch in 2014, Carola is joint Director of the Centre for Personalised Immunology (an NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence) that aims to dissect the genetic, molecular and cellular pathogenesis of immune disease in individual patients with the goal of improving diagnoses and identifying targeted therapies.