Tim Elliott left the University of Oxford (Balliol) with a first in Biochemistry in 1983 and completed his PhD in cancer immunotherapy at the University of Southampton in 1986. He did his postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Herman Eisen at the Center for Cancer Research. In 1990 he returned to the University of Oxford to join the Institute for Molecular Medicine as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, joining a key group of immunologists studying antigen presentation at the molecular level. In 1993 he was appointed to a lectureship and later a Professorship at Balliol College, University of Oxford, as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science. In 2000, he moved to the University of Southampton as Professor of Experimental Oncology and five years later became Associate Dean for the Faculty of Medicine. In 2015 he stepped down from this role to take up interim Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) for the University of Southampton. He was Director of the new Southampton Centre for Cancer Immunology which opened in 2018, and Deputy Director of the interdisciplinary Southampton Institute for Life Sciences until he joined the University of Oxford as Kidani Professor of Immuno-oncology in 2021. He is a world leader in the field of antigen presentation and T cell biology and has incorporated discoveries in the areas of antigen processing, T cell regulation and immunodominance into the development of new cancer immunotherapies. He is the recipient of a Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Award; a Fellow of the Royal Society for Biology and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences; founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Immunotherapy Advances published by the British Society for Immunology; and chairs the Cancer Research UK Cancer Immunology expert review committee.