It was as an undergraduate at Cambridge where Dr Harriet Groom's passion for molecular virology first began. Harriet completed her PhD under the supervision of Andrew Lever in the Department of Medicine, understanding the control of HIV gene expression. She then moved to the National Institute of Medical Research (now Francis Crick Institute) in London where she helped to disprove the reported novel retrovirus XMRV’s link to human infection and disease. Harriet then began my work on cellular inhibition of retroviruses, focusing on HIV, before moving back to Cambridge in 2015 as a Henslow Research Fellow at Downing College and an Associate Principal Investigator in the Department of Medicine where she continued work on cellular inhibitors of HIV. In her current fellowship Harriet continues to unpick how the intricate interactions between cells and viruses during infection can dictate host response and help us understand normal cell behaviour using retroviruses, herpesviruses and coronaviruses as model systems.
Harriet is currently a Stanley Elmore Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College and an associated PI in the Department of Medicine, where she researches the molecular interactions between retroviruses and human cells.
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Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
The structural mechanics of shape-changing structures: from bending armadillos, self-deploying satellites, to roll-up displays.
Most structures, e.g. buildings & bridges, are designed to be near rigid when loaded: in view of high winds or heavy traffic, their movements are barely noticeable. Formally, they are stiff, strong and stable, in terms of their “structural mechanics” – the study of their loaded deformation. Large movements from material weakness, overloading, or bad design, typically portend failure & eventual collapse. Embracing large movements, i.e. deliberate changes in shape, can admit new behaviour if safe and reversible, to yield transformer-like technologies and simple explanations of biological morphology, for example. In this talk, I will describe several structural mechanics principles for making shape-changing structures, out of ordinary materials, complete with physical demonstrations.
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