It was as an undergraduate at Cambridge where Dr Harriet Groom's passion for molecular virology first began. Harriet completed her PhD under the supervision of Andrew Lever in the Department of Medicine, understanding the control of HIV gene expression. She then moved to the National Institute of Medical Research (now Francis Crick Institute) in London where she helped to disprove the reported novel retrovirus XMRV’s link to human infection and disease. Harriet then began my work on cellular inhibition of retroviruses, focusing on HIV, before moving back to Cambridge in 2015 as a Henslow Research Fellow at Downing College and an Associate Principal Investigator in the Department of Medicine where she continued work on cellular inhibitors of HIV. In her current fellowship Harriet continues to unpick how the intricate interactions between cells and viruses during infection can dictate host response and help us understand normal cell behaviour using retroviruses, herpesviruses and coronaviruses as model systems.
Harriet is currently a Stanley Elmore Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College and an associated PI in the Department of Medicine, where she researches the molecular interactions between retroviruses and human cells.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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