In our lab in the Blizard Institute at QMUL we aim to understand how viruses work:  how they infect us and cause disease and how they evade our millions of years worth of antiviral innate immunity. We take a multidisciplinary approach, combining molecular genetics, imaging, computation, phylogenetics and structural biology to understand in detail how viruses interact with their hosts. We explore novel therapeutic approaches for combating viral infection and inflammation using viruses as tools to guide us. We’d really like to better understand what is special about pandemic viruses HIV-1(M) and SARS-CoV-2 and how they have adapted to replicate in humans and cause disease. Of course, we also learn about host biology when we study viruses.   We like to think that virologists are cell biologists with extra assays.