Dr Lidia Lasecka

Through her academic education Lidia Lasecka became interested in how viruses interact with their hosts and therefore joined the research group of Dr Michael D. Baron where she studied molecular biology of Nairobi sheep disease virus (genus Nairovirus, family Bunyaviridae) as a part of her PhD studies.

After her PhD Lidia joined a large collaborative project between The Pirbright Institute, University of St Andrews, Leeds, Dundee and Edinburgh, working for research groups supervised by Prof. Terry Jackson and Dr Donald King. As a part of this project she uses Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in order to understand ‘flexibility’ of the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) genome, investigate new strategies of FMDV attenuation (weakening) and study virus-host interactions. Recently she developed a strong interest in use of bioinformatics and phylogeny to identify extent of changes across the wild type FMDV genomes and evolution of viral quasispecies (group of viruses related by a similar mutations).

Lidia enjoys public engagement and is a STEM Ambassador; for the last few years she has been organising an interactive stand at The Big Bang Fair South East and since 2014 she has been giving two lectures a year to Master’s degree students at The University of Surrey.