Joulia lab

We are the Joulia lab based at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College studying lung immune response in respiratory diseases

"Our lab asks a deceptively simple question: when the immune system sounds the alarm, what happens to the blood vessels of the lung?"

Respiratory disorders, from asthma to severe lung injury, involve profound vascular changes that are poorly understood.

The lab is focussed on three aspects:

Mast cell biology: Mechanisms of activation, degranulation, and effector function at the vascular interface
Pericyte function: How pericytes maintain vessel integrity and how immune signals compromise this
Vascular remodelling: Structural changes in the pulmonary vasculature during inflammatory disease

If you want to know more about what we are doing, watch the animation we created below !

We are always happy to be contacted by students, postdocs and member of the public to discuss our research.

Please contact us at [email protected]

[YouTube video]

[Gallery picture]

Publications from the lab

A single-cell spatial chart of the airway wall reveals proinflammatory cellular ecosystems and their interactions in health and asthma

R. Joulia, Sara Patti, W. Traves, Lola E Loewenthal, Laura Yates, S. Walker, F. Puttur, May Al-Sahaf, Katherine N. Cahill, Juying Lai, Salman Siddiqui, Joshua A. Boyce, Elliot Israel, Clare M. Lloyd

Nature Immunology, 2025

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMedCentral PubMed

Location, Location, Location: Spatial Immune-Stroma Crosstalk Drives Pathogenesis in Asthma

R. Joulia, C. M. Lloyd

Immunological Reviews, vol. 330, 2025, pp. e70013

Location matters: defining the architecture of the bronchial wall in health and asthma

R. Joulia, Clare M Lloyd

Nature Immunology, 2025

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMed

Basophils: Regulators of lung inflammation over space and time

R. Joulia, Clare M. Lloyd

Journal of Experimental Medicine, 2024

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMedCentral PubMed

Contact

[Contact picture]

Regis Joulia

Contact description

National Heart and Lung Institute

Imperial College

National Heart & Lung Institute
Faculty of Medicine | Imperial College London
Dr Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Building (VPD) level 3 office 320
Imperial College Hammersmith Campus
Du Cane Road, London W12 0NN, United Kingdom

Curriculum vitae