External Seminar | Dr Emma Hodcroft

Dr Emma Hodcroft (University of Bern) will be speaking at the UCL Division of Infection and Immunity External Seminar Programme on Monday 24 January.

The seminar will be held virtually via MS Teams. All are welcome to attend.

Please contact Henry Hassan (henry.hassan@ucl.ac.uk) if you would like to join the seminar. If you would like to meet the speaker after the seminar please contact the host.

Seminar details

Since the UK government announced a more transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2 in December 2020, countries around the world have quickly committed resources to tracking the main variants of concern (VoC). But even variants without obvious changes in viral traits can give insight into how SARS-CoV-2 spreads, help track specific epidemics, and give clues about arising mutations.

However, tracking variants can be challenging for scientists - with over 5 million publicly available sequences, it is no small task to track and monitor emerging and existing variants. Additionally, determining which variants may pose the greatest threat is often not straightforward.

Here, Dr Emma Hodcroft will discuss significant variants and what we have observed about them, how we detect variants of concern and interest, and how both our methods and what we classify as “variants worth watching” may change in the future.

Further information

• Academic profile: Dr Emma Hodcroft
• University of Bern