Veterinary Medicine

What I do:  

I am currently researching correlates of immune protection to SARS-CoV-2, examining the role of under-researched proteins in these immune responses, as well as how they could contribute to broader protection and more robust future vaccines.

What I do:

I am now developing a new therapeutic approach and reagents that will enhance complement-mediated microbial killing. These reagents are highly potent recombinant bi-specific antibodies that eradicate bacteria via complement-mediated lysis and phagocytosis. This finding has been filed as a patent entitled “Targeted catalytic complement-activating molecules and methods of use thereof”.

Research Interests:

Role of complement system in immune defense against microbial and viral infection

Streptococcus suis is a common pig pathogen colonising nearly all pig farms. While hardly lethal in pigs, S. suis still causes large economic losses to the swine industry because infected meat cannot be sold. Moreover, S. suis is extremely dangerous for meat industry workers, because when transmitted to humans it causes meningitis in 80% of patients and deafness in 60% of recovered casualties. Unfortunately, neither a vaccine nor diagnostic tool against S. suis is available, therefore the development of alternative control is an utterly important task.

• What I do: I am a PhD student and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the Department of Veterinary Medicine, studying the relationship between host ecology and viral emergence with a focus on zoonotic paramyxoviruses in fruit bats.
• Research Interests: My research interests include disease biogeography, machine learning as a tool for host prediction, and viral surveillance in natural history museum collections.

I am currently a PhD student in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor James Wood. My PhD topic will build on my previous work on the FluMAP study, which focused on understanding more about the avian influenza epidemic in the UK, and farmers behaviours and implementation of biosecurity on UK poultry farms.