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Over 100 participants joined our Senior Tutor in latest Lucy’s virtual event

The aim of this particular #LucyInLockdown talk by Senior Tutor Dr Jane Greatorex was to help us understand a little bit about the viruses that cause pandemics, in particular SARS-COV2. Jane covered the virus structure, life cycle, it’s pathogenesis, how it is transmitted and why we take the mitigations we do.

This talk is like no other talk I have ever given. Ordinarily, as an academic you are talking to people in your own field, usually quite narrow field, and in the College context I might be talking about my life and travels with other academics who are simply interested. But this time everyone is affected personally by this, in one way or another.”

Jane guided us step by step through this really interesting, but complicated topic, and concluded her talk with a useful Q&A sessions.

You can watch the full video below.

My belief is that we will continue to learn from this. This is unprecedented working together of scientist at this moment in time and I believe that with such a will to sort this out we will be able to mitigate against things, hopefully eradicate the virus or at least drive it down to the levels of other respiratory winter viruses.”

 

About Jane

Jane Greatorex is Senior Tutor, Undergraduate and Graduate Tutor and Director of Studies in Pre-Clinical Medical and Veterinary Sciences at Lucy Cavendish College. She has had a long career in academic and clinical science, specializing in the blood borne viruses and, until September 2017, was responsible for streamlining and improving HIV diagnostic services at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge. As a scientist used to working in high containment laboratories, she was a team leader in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak in 2015 and remains on the list of scientists that may be called upon to respond in the event of a similar occurrence. She remains involved in a number of research projects, specifically exploring the use of next generation sequencing for the identification of resistance mutations in HIV and human herpes viruses. Jane also maintains an active research interest in the Influenza virus, most recently working on the shedding and survival of H1N1v (“swine ‘flu”).