We wish to appoint four excellent and ambitious early to mid-career principal investigators who are capable of developing innovative and original research programmes:

• 2 x Permanent positions focused on Host-virus Interactions
• 1 x Permanent position focused on Plant Virology
• 1 x Permanent position focused on Host Responses to Microbes

Find out more and apply

A £1.7m laboratory building which will investigate infectious diseases has opened at the University of Warwick – helping to tackle some of the most globally important human diseases and prepare for pandemics of the future. The new containment suite will enable scientists to conduct cutting-edge research into infectious diseases, including tuberculosis (TB), influenza and COVID-19.
Press release (8 December)

Professor Matt Keeling and Dr Louise Dyson were part of the Warwick Zeeman team invited to attend the Weldon Prize giving in Oxford.

This prize is awarded annually for ‘noteworthy contributions to the development of mathematical or statistical methods applied to problems in Biology’. This year it was given to the SPI-M-O group (part of SAGE) in recognition for their work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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A £1.7 million memorial donation will help drive new research into antimicrobial resistance at the University of Warwick. The donation, made in recognition of the late Sir Howard Dalton, will fund research and scholarships to help discover new drugs that target resistant microbes.

On Thursday 20 October, a launch event was held in the University of Warwick’s new Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building (IBRB) for the Sir Howard Dalton Centre for Translational Mechanistic Enzymology. Professor Chris Dowson, Co-Director of the new Centre said “A key focus for scientists at the Centre will be understanding changes to enzyme structures which underpin drug resistance in microbes. We want to discover how these modified enzymes are formed and what we can do to overcome the resistance".

Press Release (21 October 2022)

Over the next few weeks the University is showcasing the vital roles our technical staff play in the world-class research and teaching at Warwick. The latest video features Georgia Lavender, Senior Teaching Lab Technician, from the SLS Teaching Lab.
Watch the video.

Livestock diseases will be better managed by incorporating the behaviours of individual farmers into national infection control policies, according to new research.

The findings are the latest from the BBSRC-funded Farmer-led Epidemic and Endemic Disease-management (FEED) project, an interdisciplinary research group including epidemiologists, mathematical modellers, behavioural scientists and veterinarians from the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham. The research is published this week, in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, in a paper entitled “Modelling livestock infectious disease control policy under differing social perspectives on vaccination behaviour”.

Press Release (15 July 2022)

'Know Your River' is a new citizen science project based at the School of Life Sciences, funded by the Enhancing Research Culture Fund from UKRI.

The Know Your River Team, led by Dr Chiara Borsetto, is looking at the pollution state of rivers in England and their use for recreational purposes by using a citizen science approach. The project aims to raise awareness across the public on the issue of sewage pollution in rivers and associated risks to human health and also to engage with policy makers to help promote safeguarding of our rivers.

Anyone who is interested in rivers or using rivers for recreational activities across England can help by telling us how they use rivers and what their perception of river pollution is through anonymous surveys. You can also join in by collecting river water samples from across the River Severn, Thames and Humber catchment areas. The water samples will be analysed for presence of E.coli and other coliform bacteria resistant to antibiotics and the presence of selected antibiotics will also be monitored. We believe that citizen science can be a powerful tool to gather information about the environment we all live in. The deadline for participation is Thursday 30 June.

If you would like to find out more or be involved in the project, then please visit our website at www.warwick.ac.uk/knowyourriver and follow us on Twitter.

It was announced last month that two new antibiotics may be available on the NHS. Professor Chris Dowson explains why there is an urgent need to develop new antimicrobials and protect the drugs we have.

Knowledge Centre article (12 April 2022)

A new Lancet study shows that over a million people died in 2019 from infections caused by bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Dr Freya Harrison and Dr Antonia Sagona comment on the importance of this new evidence and the need to tackle the issue of antibiotic resistance urgently.

Expert Comment (20 January 2022)

Poolbeg Pharma, a clinical stage infectious disease pharmaceutical company, has in-licenced a novel, first-in-class RNA-based immunotherapy for respiratory virus infections.

Poolbeg has secured an exclusive licence to this dual antiviral prophylactic and therapeutic candidate, which is at a late-pre-clinical development stage. The candidate, which will be developed by Poolbeg as POLB 002, was developed at the University of Warwick and derived from twenty years of research with world class virologists, Professor Andrew Easton and Professor Nigel Dimmock.

Press release (17 January 2022)