- This event has passed.
Influenza pandemics: past and future
30 October 2018 | 18:00 - 20:00
£3Event Navigation
This event is held in the Pfizer lecture theatre in the Cambridge University Chemistry Department and will be followed with a wine and cheese reception.
2018 marks the centenary of the worst infectious disease outbreak to have affected modern man, the Spanish influenza pandemic. More than 50 million people around the world died as a result of infection by that deadly pathogen. Influenza pandemics arise every few decades from an aleatoric event of nature that gives opportunity for an animal virus to adapt to man. Understanding why some strains of avian influenza virus can manage this evolutionary trick but others do not will eventually allow us to better predict the human pandemic threat posed by each new virus as it emerges.
From her Natural Sciences BA from the University of Cambridge and her PhD on rhinoviruses from the University of Reading in the late 80s, Professor Barclay has been at the forefront of research on small RNA viruses. Gaining skills as a postdoctoral fellow in Reading and then New York, she joined Imperial College in 2007, where she is Action Medical Research Chair in Virology. Her most notable work involved looking at cells infected with influenza A virus and identifing RIG-I agonists.
2018 marks the centenary of the worst infectious disease outbreak to have affected modern man, the Spanish influenza pandemic. More than 50 million people around the world died as a result of infection by that deadly pathogen. Influenza pandemics arise every few decades from an aleatoric event of nature that gives opportunity for an animal virus to adapt to man. Understanding why some strains of avian influenza virus can manage this evolutionary trick but others do not will eventually allow us to better predict the human pandemic threat posed by each new virus as it emerges.
From her Natural Sciences BA from the University of Cambridge and her PhD on rhinoviruses from the University of Reading in the late 80s, Professor Barclay has been at the forefront of research on small RNA viruses. Gaining skills as a postdoctoral fellow in Reading and then New York, she joined Imperial College in 2007, where she is Action Medical Research Chair in Virology. Her most notable work involved looking at cells infected with influenza A virus and identifing RIG-I agonists.
