Dr Trevor Sweeney

Trevor grew up in Leitrim in Ireland before moving to Dublin to study Biochemistry in Trinity College. He then worked for two years as a research assistant at UCSF in San Francisco studying the regulation of nuclear hormone receptors during infection. Trevor then moved to Imperial College London for his PhD studies and characterised a number of proteins expressed by the foot-and-mouth disease virus, earning a PhD in Structural and Molecular Virology.

Following his PhD Trevor moved to Brooklyn, New York to work with Professors Tatyana Pestova and Christopher Hellen to investigate the intricacies of viral protein expression. Here, Trevor demonstrated the essential role of various host proteins in regulating poliovirus protein synthesis and identified and characterised a new class of picornaviral internal ribosomal entry site found in Aichi virus. He has also contributed to our understanding of basic cellular translation revealing important details on the mechanism of translation initiation factors.

While in Brooklyn Trevor also became interested in host mechanisms of restriction by targeting virus translation. He characterised the translation regulatory role of the IFIT family of interferon induced proteins. In 2014 he was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to move to the Division of Virology at the University of Cambridge to establish his own lab and from 2016-2025 is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society to study IFIT1 activity and flavivirus replication.

Trevor joined The Pirbright Institute in October 2021, where he leads the Viral Gene Expression group. He is keen to hear from those interested in joining the lab for postgraduate studies or postdoctoral research.