Session Chair: Professor James Wood, University of Cambridge and UK-ICN Lead for One Health and Zoonoses

Professor Florian Krammer, ICAHN School of Medicine at Mount Sinai – Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination

Currently Prof. Krammer holds a position as a Professor of Vaccinology at the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He has published more than 100 papers, is member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Virology, Plos One and Heliyon and is a peer reviewer for more than 30 journals. Dr. Krammer is also member of the Vaccine and Edward Jenner Society Young Investigator Program. In addition he is a scientific adviser for enGenes and PathSensors.The Krammer laboratory – which is also part of the NIH-funded Centers for Excellence in Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS) – focuses on understanding broadly-reactive immune responses against the surface glycoproteins of RNA viruses such as influenza with the goal to develop better vaccines and novel therapeutics.

Florian’s profile and twitter

Dr Valeria Calvaresi, King’s College London – Structural dynamics in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein

Valeria graduated with Honours in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology in Sapienza, University of Rome in 2013. She inititally approached mass spectrometry with the analysis of small molecules and peptides. She won a national competition for italian graduate students in STEM, which allowed her to undertake a research period abroad in Paris. She worked as a scientist at the Institut Pasteur and quickly developed a strong interest in proteomics and structural mass spectrometry, especially in hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS). In 2017, she got a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship to undertake a PhD between the University of Copnhagen and GSK vaccines in Italy, to study vaccine antigens in their native membrane environment and the immune response to vaccination by HDX-MS. Since 2020, Valeria hsa been working as a post doc in the Chemistry department of King’s College London and continues to develop HDX-MS methods to interrogate the structural dynamics of membrane proteins and viral surface proteins. Particularly, she focuses on the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein and it’s biomolecular interaction with host receptors and antibodies – in collaboration with Francis Crick Institute and the School of Immunology of KCL.