Early Careers Researcher Conference

22nd July 2025

University of Liverpool, Main Campus, UK

Please join us for our second ECR conference! Our aim is to provide a friendly environment for delegates to practice presenting their work, with priority given to less experienced members of the network to present and chair alongside more experienced members. This will be an ECR-led event organised to promote coronavirus researcher development at various career stages. Presentation slots offered are 15 minutes: 12 minute presentation and 2-3 minutes of questions.

In advance of the 2025 AGM we are hosting an ECR specific day exclusively for ECR members of the UK-ICN. The discussed topics will fit within the UK-ICN research themes, with the sessions containing a mixture of topics. Included is a careers panel and Q&A session to encourage discussion of available careers opportunities to ECRs. Details of confirmed speakers below.

ECR Conference Career Session Panellists

Our career session hosts panellists from a diverse background of scientific careers. Each speaker will give a short overview of their career history followed by a open question and answer session.

Mr Sameer Ayaz, Senior Scientist, Astra Zeneca, Liverpool, UK

Sameer Ayaz is Senior Scientist within an R&D team at AstraZeneca which is associated with Fluenz/FluMist, a seasonal live attenuated influenza vaccine. Sameer has been working at AZ for 12 years and is in the process of completing his PhD on a part time basis project studying the role of intersegmental vRNA:vRNA interactions across influenza virus and how they regulate genomic packaging and assembly. His research has primarily focussed on understanding fundamental molecular virology of influenza vaccine viruses in areas such as Defective Interfering Particles (DIP) and genome packaging to understand and help develop approaches to optimise the vaccine.

Dr Charlotte Cook, Senior Scientist, UKHSA, London, UK

Charlotte Cook is a Senior Scientist in the Emerging Infections & Zoonoses team in the UK Health Security Agency. Charlotte completed her DPhil on lumpy skin disease virus with the University of Oxford at Prof. Pip Beard’s lab at the Pirbright Institute, and worked briefly on mpox as a postdoctoral researcher. She joined the Civil Service in 2023, working for the Government Office for Science on foresight projects and as part of the National Security and Resilience team as their animal and human health desk lead. Since July 2024, Charlotte has been working as an epidemiologist at UKHSA, detecting, assessing and communicating potential zoonotic or emerging infectious disease threats to public health.

Dr Dalan Bailey, Viral Glycoproteins Group Leader, The Pirbright Institute, Surrey, UK

Dalan’s lab has two major focuses: The first is virus-host interactions that take place during virus entry and exit, and how they govern host-range, e.g. receptor interactions and antibody neutralisation. The second major focus is the molecular virology of viral inclusion bodies, phase separated organelles that form in the cytoplasm of mononegavirales-infected cells. Since 2005 he has published over 70 manuscripts in this area including publications in Nature Microbiology, PLOS Biology, PLOS Pathogens, JBC and the Journal of Virology. Dalan is actively involved in research, lecturing and the supervision of junior researchers and in the last 10 years as PI has supervised over 30 undergraduate and postgraduate students in his lab. His lab currently has around 10 people funded by the BBSRC and Wellcome Trust. Dalan is also an editor for the Journal of General Virology and has extensive expertise in scientific writing and communications.

Mr Ed Day, Press Officer, The Science Media Centre, UK

Ed has been a press officer at the Science Media Centre (SMC) since August 2022. He graduated from University College London with a degree in Natural Sciences, and was an intern at the SMC in 2019, before working for a few years in scientific publishing at an Immunology journal.

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