Current Team
Dr Matthew Reeves
Principal Investigator
Reader/Associate Professor of Molecular Virology
Matthew trained with Profs. John Sinclair and Patrick Sissons at the University of Cambridge before leaving for the States on a Presidential Fellowship to work with Prof. Teresa Compton at Novartis in Cambridge, MA. He returned to the UK and Cambridge with the support of a prestigious MRC Career Development Fellowship and subsequently transferred that to UCL in 2013 where he established his laboratory in the CMV research group based in Institute of Immunity & Transplantation. Although his consistent focus has been the molecular basis of HCMV latency and reactivation he remains interested how the virus manipulates the host cell in all phases of infection and why our immune system controls but does not sterilise HCMV infections.
Dr Stephanie Chong
Clinical PhD student
Stephanie is a Specialist Registrar in Nephrology who is interested in viral factors that promote Kidney disease and graft rejection in transplant patients.
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Stephanie was also a Clinical Lecturer during which time she generated the pilot data for her successful PhD Studentship application. Stephanie will be supported by the Royal Free Charity to investigate the role of BK polyoma virus in kidney disease. This is an exciting collaboration between ourselves and the Division of Renal Medicine and seeks to shed new light on an increasingly important medical problem.
Ines Hofer
BBSRC LiDO PhD student
Ines joins the lab in a collaborative project with Radu Zabet at QMUL. Ines hails from Austria and joins the lab with a background in forensic science.
She will be working on a project that combines bioinformatics, systems biology approaches to the study of chromatin conformation and virology to understand the fundamental principles governing haematopoietic cell fate and how a virus may help understand this.
Anastasia Lankina
BBSRC LiDO PhD Student
Ana joins the lab as a joint PhD student with Judy Breuer and will combine in silico approaches with wet lab experimentation to understand the importance of gB domains for infection and immune control. Ana is currently focused on understanding the importance of AD6 in gB - both from an immunological and functional point of view.
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Ana hails from Russia and thus feels none of us really know what cold is! We have yet to establish whether Ana likes vodka or not. This seems an oversight on our part...
Aisha re-joins the lab after her MSc project to continue her work on HCMV reactivation and, specifically, to investigate the molecular mechanisms that control reactivation in dendritic cells. Aisha's project is seeking to understand how src family kinase signalling translates into the recruitment of histone acetyltransferase activity to MIEP.
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Aisha is sponsored by a Qatar Embassy Scholarship and it appears will be bringing dates (the food not escorts!) to the lab on a regular basis. Also it has become clear recently that you have to be careful playing Uno against Aisha.
Aisha Fakhroo
PhD student - Qatar Embassy Scholarship
New Positions to be filled.....
We will be recruiting 3x Post Doctoral researchers to join our team in the next few months. These posts will lead specific projects that will investigate:
1) Molecular mechanisms that control HCMV latency
2) identifying immune responses important for HCMV vaccine efficacy
3) Identification and characterisation of antibodies directed against BK virus (with Alan Salama)
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In addition we will also be looking to recruit:
1) A research technician to support the ongoing programme of work investigating the molecular and immunological mechanisms of latency
2) A non-clinical PhD student to continue our work studying the role of tissue resident immunity in the control of HCMV in transplant organs (with Reza Motallabzadeh).
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We are always interested to hear from individuals who want to join our group who have secured a UCL DTP place (BBSRC LiDO or MRC-DTP) or have secured independent PhD or fellowship funding or wish to apply.
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