Title:Understanding T cell recognition and viral evolution

Presenter: Prof. Miles Davenport

University: University of New South Wales

Time: 10:00-11:00, 22 July, 2011

Venue: A203, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Introduction of Prof. Miles Davenport: Professor Miles Davenport is Head of the Complex Systems in Biology group at the University of New South Wales. He completed a medical degree at the University of Sydney and a D.Phil in experimental immunology at the University of Oxford, before shifting his research focus to theoretical and mathematical biology. His current focus is on understanding pathogen persistence and vaccine failure in chronic infections like HIV, CMV, and malaria. He has a wide variety of experimental collaborations both in Australia and overseas which aim to combine theory and modeling to better understand experimental data. These projects range from bioinformatics approaches to understanding immune recognition and viral evolution, through to mathematical modeling of host-pathogen interactions in human and animal infection. He has published over 60 papers in the last 5 years, involving collaboration with around 20 experimental groups. He was President of the Australasian Society for Immunology in 2009-10, and is currently an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow.

Abstract: Improvements in technology have greatly increased the volume of sequences that can be obtained for studying host-pathogen interactions. However, the bioinformatic and statistical tools available to analyse this data have not advanced at the same pace. For example, in studying T cell receptor sequences,we need to ask questions about how repertoire changes with vaccination, with chronic infection, and with host age. How do we do this in a circumstance of incomplete repertoire coverage, sequencing error and other experimental issues? Professor Davenport has worked on developing novel statistical and experimental approaches to understanding T cell receptor repertoire in infection, and will present the results of different approaches to the analysis of T cell receptor and HIV viral sequences to understand immune recognition and viral evolution.