Teaching

Teaching is a fundamental activity at any University and Reading is no exception. Virology at Reading is taught as part of the degree of Microbiology, where all the Virology modules are compulsory, but many  modules are also taken as options by students reading Biological Sciences, Biomedical sciences and Biochemistry. The complete range of my teaching is:

Part I - Fundamental Microbiology (part of)

Part II - Practical Virology; Viruses and their Hosts; Immunology (part of).

Part III - Viruses as Pathogens; Molecular Microbiology (part of); Cancer (part of).

The Practical Virology module, which I co-ordinate, includes 7 practical sessions where I teach plaque assays and other ways of handling and enumerating viruses.

 A plaque assay of baculoviruses that express GFP - only visible because the plate is irradiated with UV light.

Virology teaching gets across the fundamentals of viruses and their strategies for replication and transmission through lectures on defined classes of viruses (e.g. those with a shared genome structure) or on those associated with particular environmental niches (e.g. the respiratory tract). All teaching includes a high degree of molecular detail as well as the more traditional areas of morphology and disease. My teaching is available to Reading students on Blackboard along with a variety of supportive and informative material (below).

 Examples of additional pages mounted on Blackboard and available to students. Here I review virus coverage in the media and popular books

Two recent articles aimed at general readership are available online:

Prions show their metal (a brief account of the findings that prion proteins, vCJD, BSE etc, are copper binding proteins).

Hosting a killer (an overview of viruses).