He has held professorship positions at Harvard Medical School (1989-2002), Imperial College London (2000-2005), was a Principal Investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (1988-2002) and the Professor of Molecular Immunology at the University of Cambridge (2005-2016).
His research also showed that a mutant form of the immune cell adapter protein termed ADAP, identified in his lab, blocks the infection of T-cells by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV-1).
Further, his lab has pioneered the use of small molecule inhibitors (SMIs) of the kinase glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) to down-regulate the inhibitory co-receptor programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) in cancer immunotherapy.
Rudd's work has had important clinical outcomes as it laid the foundation for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cancer therapy that has been pioneered by Zelig Eshhar (Israel) and Carl June (USA).
These observations have had important implications in the field of oncology, since for the first time, a function was provided for the p60 src family of proto-oncogenes in normal cell growth.