Scientific Advisory Board

Imperial College London

Professor Wendy Barclay is Action Medical Research Chair in Virology and Head of the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College London.

She began her scientific career at what was then the Common Cold Unit in Salisbury and later trained in molecular virology at the University of Reading and Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York. Professor Barclay's research has focused on respiratory viruses and the factors affecting how they are transmitted and cause disease. She has contributed to the understanding of how these viruses cause pandemics, and how we can best develop strategies to combat them. Her lab's most prominent discovery is the identity of a host factor that is hijacked by the influenza virus when it replicates in our cells. She showed how differences in this factor between birds and humans explains why we don't get frequently infected by bird flu viruses.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, her collaborations with the UK Health Security Agency and roles on several government advisory committees provided critical evidence on emerging threats from SARS-CoV-2 and its variants. Her lab pivoted to work on the newly emerged SARS-CoV-2 virus, in projects that spanned basic virology and immunology as well as analysis of environmental samples for traces of the virus.

Her laboratory's work continues to inform scientific discourse and public health policy on the potential pandemic threat of influenza strains and a host of other respiratory viruses. She is a key collaborator in numerous national scientific groups, including a national consortium established to tackle bird flu outbreaks in the UK, as well as leading the UK's Genotype to Phenotype Virology (G2P) Consortium, established to study the impact of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and help UKHSA risk assess novel variants in real time as they arise.

Home - Professor Wendy Barclay (imperial.ac.uk)
Barclay Laboratory | Research groups | Imperial College London

INVITE Research

After earning his doctorate in artificial intelligence 23 years ago, Dr. Coulon started at Bayer AG in the field of automation. After holding various positions in Operational Excellence and Marketing, he has been with the research subsidiary INVITE - a 50:50 joint venture between Bayer and the two universities Technische Universität Dortmund and Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf - for six years. INVITE's mission is to advance the use of new technologies in production and the laboratory.

https://www.invite-research.com/
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Leibniz Institute of Virology

Viral Zoonoses - One Health
The Department of Viral Zoonoses - One Health, headed by Prof. Dr. Gülsah Gabriel, investigates the interspecies transmission of influenza A viruses from animals to humans and the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis in humans, particularly with regard to risk factors (pregnancy, obesity and gender dependence).

Institute LIV

Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research
Freie Universität Berlin

Alex D. Greenwood is Head of the Department of Wildlife Diseases at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and Professor of Wildlife Diseases at the Freie Universität Berlin in the Department of Veterinary Medicine in Germany. He has a degree in biology from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has worked on ancient DNA at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich and the American Museum of Natural History and virology at the Helmolz Zentrum Munich. Prof. Greenwood is an evolutionary virologist focusing on retroviruses and herpesviruses. He is investigating how viruses transmit in the environment, particularly using water as an abiotic vector, among and between species. He has a long standing interest in evolutionary mechanisms underlying retroviral colonization of vertebrate genomes and both the consequences and benefits for host species health. He is also actively engaged in developing high throughput methods for identifying and characterizing novel pathogens of wildlife using non-invasive methods.

Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research
Freie Universität Berlin

University of Bern

Coronavirus-Host Interaction: Innate Immune Evasion and Coronavirus Replication.
One of our long-term goals is to study CoV replication in order to develop strategies to prevent and control CoV infections. Over the past years the research, we have been able to clone and propagate full length coronavirus (CoV) cDNAs from several CoVs using vaccinia virus as eukaryotic cloning vector. The reverse genetic system is based upon the in vitro transcription of infections RNA from a cloned full-length cDNA copy of a CoV genome, and the introduction of nucleotide changes, deletions or insertions is facilitated by vaccinia virus-mediated recombination. The reverse genetic system has proven to be rapid, robust and versatile and is available in the laboratory of Dr. Thiel for the generation of recombinant prototype viruses of all major CoV phylogenetic lineages, namely for HCoV 229E, type-I and type-II Feline CoVs (genus Alphacoronavirus), Mouse Hepatitis Virus strain A59, SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 (genus Betacoronavirus), and Avian Infectious Bronchitis Virus (genus Gammacoronavirus).

Institute of Virology and Immunology - University of Bern
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