Dr Matt Whelan

Matt is a cellular microbiologist who develops cutting edge imaging approaches to understand how pathogens manipulate nucleocytoplasmic trafficking, nuclear pore complexes, and nuclear integrity to evade detection and facilitate their lifecycles. Throughout his postdoc working closely with the Jolly lab, he specialised in understanding how SARS-CoV-2 manipulates the nuclear import of proinflammatory transcription factors. This led to his fascination with viral manipulation of nucleocytoplasmic trafficking and the nucleus that inspired his own labs research. Having established his own group in QMUL, he continues to work closely with the Jolly lab to provide cutting edge microscopy solutions to answer fundamental question of HIV cell biology.

Prof Alex Sigal

Alex is a member of faculty at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, and a Virologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We have known Alex for many years, sharing similar interests in HIV-1 cell-cell spread and T cell infection biology. More recently, Alex’s interests in emerging viruses led his lab to be the first to isolate the Omicron and Beta variants of SARS-CoV-2. We have worked closely with Alex and his team at AHRI since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to understand SARS-CoV-2 variants evolution for enhanced innate immune evasion. This includes more recent studies on intrahost evolution during chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection of immunocompromised individuals. We have also very much enjoyed our visits to St Lucia and Durban at HIV and SARS-CoV-2 scientific conferences organised by Alex and his team

Prof Mala Maini

Mala is Professor of Viral Immunology at the IIT at UCL. Her group investigates the regulation and harnessing of tissue-compartmentalised adaptive immunity in hepatitis B, liver cancer and SARS-COV-2. We worked with Mala and members of her lab to discover that HIV-1 uses its accessory protein Vpr to drive resting T cells to gain characteristics of tissue-resident memory T cells, revealing a new mechanism of HIV-1 reservoir formation driven by the virus itself.

Prof Rob deBruin

Rob is Professor of Molecular Cancer Biology at UCL. Rob’s lab explores how the cell cycle is regulated in healthy cells and how its disruption drives cancer. We have recently teamed up with Rob to understand how HIV manipulates cell cycle components to regulate infection.

Prof Jemima Burden

Jemima is Head of Electron Microscopy at the Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at UCL. We have worked with Jemima for a number of years to take a closer look at the cell biology of virus infection. Seeing is believing.

Prof Vinay Pathak

Vinay is a PI and Head of the Viral Mutation Section at the National Cancer Institute, Fredrick. Vinay has made many important discoveries that explain how HIV-1 infects cells and key virus-host interactions. More recently he has pioneered advance imaging techniques to study HIV-1 capsid nuclear import, reverse transcription and uncoating. Vinay’s lab have developed a suite of fluorescently tagged HIV-1 clones and developed new approaches for live and fixed cell imaging of HIV-1 infection. We have benefitted from Vinay’s generosity in sharing reagents, techniques and science discussions.

Prof Peijun Zhang

Professor of Structural Biology, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford. Peijun runs a state of the art structural biology group. Clare is working with Peijun to understand how HIV-1 cell-cell spread at virological synapses and activation of T cell signalling pathways regulate the early steps of HIV-1 infection of primary CD4 T cells.

Prof Kostas Thalassinos

Kostas is Professor of Mass Spectrometry at UCL. Our research uses protoemics and phosphoproteomics to understand the cell biology of HIV-1 infection of primary T cells and how HIV-1 exploits T cell signalling pathways. Kosta’s expertise has allowed us to apply cutting-edge mass spectrometry techniques to our research.

Dr Laura McCoy

Laura is an Associate Professor at the IIT at UCL. We have worked with Laura for many years to investigate how cell-cell spread allows HIV-1 to evade neutralising antibody responses. During the COVID-19 pandemic we teamed up with Laura to investigate SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses in individuals with underlying heamatological malignancies.

Prof Stuart Neil

Stuart is Professor of Virology and Head of the Department of Infectious Disease at King’s College London. Our long-standing collaboration with Stuart has centered on the restriction factor tetherin and its ability (or not) to restrict different modes of HIV-1 dissemination. More recently our respective labs have been working on SARS-CoV-2 spike targeting restriction factors and innate immune evasion, making for many interesting and fruitful discussions.

Prof Greg Towers

Greg is Professor of Molecular Virology at the Blizard Institute at QMUL. His work aims to understand the molecular details of host virus interactions and what makes pandemic viruses special, focussing on HIV and SARS-CoV-2. Greg’s lab has a long-standing interest in how innate immunity works in health and disease, how viruses evade or activate innate immunity and more recently innate immunity in cancer. We share lab meetings with Greg’s group, these dynamic and highly-interactive lab meetings provide a different perspective on our work.

Prof Ravi Gupta

Ravi is Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases. He is also Co-Director of the Global Health Institute, Hong Kong, We have a long-standing collaboration with Ravi and his group on HIV-1 cell biology, drug resistance and SARS-CoV-2.

Prof Wendy Barclay

Regius Professor of Infectious Disease, Department of Infectious Disease - Imperial College London Wendy is the Principal Investigator on the UKRI funded Genotype to Phenotype SARS-CoV-2 consortium (G2P2) and Clare works closely members if the consortium on understanding SARS-CoV-2 biology and adaptation to humans.