Partner 16 University of Cambridge (UCAM)
The University of Cambridge of is the second-oldest university in the English speaking world (after the University of Oxford), and the fourth-oldest surviving university in the world. The most prestigious international league tables consistently place it among the best handful of universities in the world. The Department of Zoology is a large, multi-disciplinary department whose members conduct research and teaching in areas ranging from molecular biology to behavioural ecology. Zoology includes some 300 people, including 12 research fellows on independent competitive grants and 90 graduate students studying for PhD degrees. Nineteen members of the Department are Fellows of The Royal Society. The Centre for Pathogen Evolution conducts world class research on a variety of topics including the evolution and epidemiology of influenza viruses, predicting the evolution of influenza viruses, methods for antigenic (including the invention of antigenic cartography), genetic, and structural analyses, assays to determine viral fitness, methods to determine serological protection (antibody landscapes), effectiveness of repeated vaccination, the economics of trivalent versus quadrivalent vaccines, and the genetic basis of antigenic change. This work is primarily conducted on influenza viruses, but is also applied to other antigenically variable pathogens including dengue, for which we have created the Dengue Antigenic Cartography Consortium of 20 laboratories worldwide, FMDV, the lyssaviruses, and EV71.
Principle Investigator: Derek Smith,
djs200@cam.ac.uk