Dr Helen Kemp completed her PhD in Microbiology at the University of Warwick and the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research, Salisbury, in 1988. Since 1989, she has worked at the University of Sheffield as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology and then in the Department of Oncology and Metabolism. She has a long-standing interest in the autoimmune and genetic aspects of the depigmenting disease vitiligo and has international collaborations on projects to profile autoantibody responses against melanocytes in melanoma, vitiligo and alopecia areata. She is also interested in characterizing autoimmune responses against the calcium-sensing receptor in patients with parathyroid autoimmunity. She has published more than 70 research papers and has contributed to books and review articles. She has been on the British Skin Foundation Grant Review Board and served as Section Editor for the British Journal of Dermatology.