Alumni

Dr Tafhima Haider

During her PhD in the Jolly lab, Tafhima worked on innate immunity and discovered how truncating the HIV envelope cytoplasmic confers resistance to SERINC5 and IFITM restriction factors. Tafhima is now a post-doc at QMUL investigating innate immune dysfunction in children from LMIC with severe malnutrition.

Dr Maitreyi Shivkumar

After completing her postdoc in the Jolly lab on molecular mechanisms regulating cell-cell spread, Maitreyi is now a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Dr Xenia Snetkov

After finishing her postdoc in the Jolly lab investigating HIV-1 Env trafficking and the role of the cytoplasmic tail, Xenia has moved into industry and is now a Senior Drug Discovery scientist at BenevolentAI.

Dr Shimona Starling

Shimona has now taken the leap into scientific publishing and is working for Nature Reviews, so keep an eye out for her updates and comments on what is hot in the world of science!

Dr Alice Len

Alice has now now moved into a career in teaching to inspire the next generation of scientists!

Dr Elisabetta Groppelli

Elisabetta did her PhD at the University of Surrey in the lab of Prof Lisa Roberts where she worked on the molecular mechanism of translation initiation (Internal Ribosomal Entry Site elements) in viral RNA. For her first postdoc she moved to the lab of Prof Dave Rowlands at the University of Leeds. There she worked on Picornavirus entry and uncoating.

Her second postdoc in Dr Clare Jolly’s lab focused on molecular mechanisms that regulate HIV-1 infection in T cells and was published in: “Contact-Induced Mitochondrial Polarization Supports HIV-1 Virological Synapse Formation” and “Retromer regulates HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein trafficking and incorporation into virions”.

Dr Boghuma Titanji

Clinically trained in Cameroon, BK was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship and came to UCL to undertake a PhD exploring the impact of antiretroviral drugs on cell-cell spread of HIV. Co-supervised by Clare Jolly and Deenan Pillay, BK successfully defended her thesis at viva and was awarded her PhD in 2014. She is now completing her specialty training in infectious diseases in the US and aims to combine a clinical career with research.