The CVR Presents Research Goes Viral

In this episode, PhD students Joanna Morrell and Yasmin Parr talk with the recently-retired Professor Roger Everett - eminent herpes virologist and resident expert in intrinsic immunity - about his career in science, his time in Glasgow and his love of the great outdoors. If you liked this, read our interview with Roger over at our blog: http://cvr.academicblogs.co.uk/icp0-and-skyewalkerno-this-is...

Professor Steve Goodbourn, from St George's, University of London, talks with PhD students Joanna Morrell and Yasmin Parr about his work on unravelling the biochemical mysteries of how viruses unravel the innate immune system of their hosts. Edited intro/outro music credit: 'Take me higher' by 'Jahzzar'. freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar/…Me_Higher_1626 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)....

Dr Jens Madsen, Associate Professor in Child Health at the University of Southampton, talks with PhD students Yasmin Parr and Joanna Morrell for episode 8 of Contagious Thinking and tells us all about the mucosal surfactant protein that forms a crucial innate immune barrier against viruses and other microbes. Edited intro/outro music credit: 'Take me higher' by 'Jahzzar'. freemusicarchive.org/musi...

In our 7th episode, PhD student Yasmin Parr and postdoc Connor Bamford chat with Professor Richard Hardy from Indiana University in the USA about his lab’s work on understanding virus infectivity, a fundamental property of viruses. Richard tells us about the surprising way arboviruses spread from insect to mammalian cells and how by understanding how this happens we may be able to make better and...

In our 6th episode, Dr Andrew Shaw, CVR postdoc, chats with Professor Dave Evans, (@evanslabuk) a virologist from the University of St Andrews, about bees and their viruses. Dave visited the CVR last year where he talked about his lab’s work on studying the replication and recombination of positive sense RNA viruses, like hepatitis C virus and polio virus. But for the podcast we chose to ask him a...

In episode 5 we talk with Dr Mike Weekes, a clinical consultant and Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow at the University of Cambridge about his lab’s work on using a technique he pioneered called ‘quantitative temporal viromics’ (which is a kind of proteomics). The Weekes lab uses this method to understand infection by human cytomegalovirus (HCMV – also known as human herpes virus 5) with an ov...

In episode 4 we meet four members of the CVR who went to Sierra Leone to help out with the ebola virus epidemic during 2015. Ph. D students Caroline Chauche and Navapon Techakriengkrai along with postdocs Agnieszka Szemiel and Chris Davis all worked in diagnostic labs in the West African country at different times during the outbreak. Here they tell us their story about what it was really like to...

Here, on World AIDS day, we meet Dr Clare Jolly, HIV virologist, about her work and her groups work on how HIV spreads from cell-to-cell and what this means for antiviral treatment and vaccination. Clare is a Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Infection & Immunity at University College London and was at the CVR earlier this year to give a seminar on her work Importantly, Tuesday 1st Decembe...

The CVR meets Mary Collins who talked to us a bit about the past, present and future of gene therapy and how we are using viruses to cure human disease. Mary is Professor of Immunology in the Division of Infection and Immunity at University College London, the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, and the Director of the Medical...

The CVR meets Professor Geoff Smith, FRS FMedSci FIBiol, head of the department of pathology at the University of Cambridge, to talk about his work on poxviruses and regulation of the innate immune response. Image credit: Geoff Smith website (http://www.path.cam.ac.uk/directory/geoffrey-smith) Edited intro/outro music credit: 'Take me higher' by 'Jahzzar'. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar...