Mamas Louca is a PhD student in the MRC-funded Warwick Doctoral Training Programme in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research. He is co-supervised by Ioannis Nezis in the School of Life Sciences.

For his PhD, Mamas is investigating how viruses exploit the process of autophagy (a process common to all eukaryotes, in which cells digest defunct or damaging material). So far, he has conducted a detailed bioinformatic analysis of a known autophagy-manipulating molecular motif in Influenza A, across viruses from different host species. He has identified several molecular questions relating to this motif which he is now investigating in the laboratory.

Mamas presented his work in a poster at the Autophagy Network Meeting (October 2022):