Antiviral immunity is our central question: how cells and animals sense viral infection, switch on the interferon response and keep it in balance. We pursue it from four directions at once.
We work on RNA viruses, especially respiratory viruses and the arboviruses spread by mosquitoes, ticks and midges. Using cell lines and primary human airway cultures, we study how these viruses replicate, how cells detect them through interferons, and how viruses evade that response, along with how co-infection and pollution change the picture.
Antiviral genes are among the fastest evolving in the genome, and comparing them across species pinpoints where hosts and viruses have been pushing against each other. We study how viruses evolve and how immune systems evolve in response, and tracking how viruses adapt to new hosts helps us reason about which might jump next.
Deep learning is our main computational tool. We use protein language and structure models alongside the evolutionary record across thousands of vertebrate genomes to predict how immune signalling proteins interact and to ask where those models are blind. The same residues tend to matter whether a cytokine system is hijacked by a virus, broken by an inherited fault, or subverted by a tumour, so the map we build reaches across infection, inflammation and cancer alike.
Understanding a mechanism is only half the story. The other half is using it. We are working towards new therapeutics by two routes: targeting the viral proteins that disarm the immune response, and strengthening the defences the host already has. Engineered cytokines are a particular interest, and building modified versions tells us what controls how they work.
A typical project runs through several of these: an evolutionary signal points to a protein interface, virology tests what it does in a real infection, computation predicts which changes matter, and the best findings become targets worth designing against.
Across all four runs a One Health view spanning wildlife, livestock and people, shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, when members of the lab helped build Northern Ireland's genomic surveillance of the virus.