Charlotte Houldcroft

Biography

Charlotte is a lecturer in the Department of Genetics, leading the Virus Genomics group.

As an undergraduate she studied Human Sciences at the University of Oxford before a PhD in Molecular Biology at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Charlotte has also worked at the UCL Institute of Child Health, and the Department of Medicine here in Cambridge.

Charlotte has an interest in how human genetic and immunological variation shape viral diversity, and how viral diversity in turn influences human evolution.

Research interests

I study the evolution and diversity of double-stranded DNA viruses, human pathogens causing diseases as diverse as respiratory infections and fever to chronic nerve pain and cancer. Whole-genome sequencing allows us to track the spread of viruses in space and time; but it also allows us to detect drug resistance, to see the emergence of novel recombinant strains and to study the ancient evolution of successful human pathogens.