SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: What have we learned and what’s next?

In this lecture, Professor Greg Towers will discuss how his work on virus infection and innate immunity helps us understand how SARS-CoV-2 is able to jump from bats to humans and cause a pandemic and global shut down. Why didn’t our innate immunity protect us? Where did it come from and how do we know it’s not a lab leak? How did we make vaccines so quickly and do they really work?

Most importantly, Professor Towers will address the future of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. What will the coronavirus do next? Could there be another pandemic in the future?

This lecture will be followed by a Q&A with Professor Towers.

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #FMSLectures

About our speaker

Greg was awarded his PhD on HIV in 1995. He worked in labs in London, Paris and New York and joined UCL in 2000. He was made Professor of Molecular Virology in 2006. His laboratory uses multidisciplinary molecular, structural and phylogenetic approaches to understanding how viruses infect us despite our sophisticated immune systems. His most recent work has defined how the SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant adapted to become dominant and what is special about the single pandemic HIV that caused the AIDS pandemic.

Access profile

This event will take place online.

A link to the event will be sent to you prior to the event start time.

Live captioning is available for this event.

We aim to make our events as inclusive as possible, so if you have any accessibility requirements or enquiries that are not covered in the above access profile please contact the events team at fmscomms@ucl.ac.uk. If you could contact us allowing as much time as possible before the event we will be able to ensure where required that the appropriate measures are taken.

We recommend that you review both the UCL privacy policy and the Eventbrite privacy notice before signing up to this event. You’ll always find the most up to date version of the UCL's privacy notice on the UCL website.