Biography

Education History:

BSc Biochemistry,1987 Institute of Biology (Dublin University of Technology, Ireland)

MSc Immunology 1990, King’s College, London (United Kingdom)

PhD Virology 1996, University of London (United Kingdom),
Career History (h-index 40, i10-index 71, ORCID 0000-0002-8113-817X)

July 2006-present: Professor of Viral Pathology, Barts & The London School of Medicine (QMUL)

2004-2009: MRC Senior Fellow, Infection and Immunity (UCL)

2000-2004: Wellcome Trust Research, Infection and Immunity (UCL)

1996-2000: Post-Doctoral Scientist (Prof. R A Weiss, UCL)

Research Biography: A 30-year history of research in virology including antibody mediated neutralization and complement inactivation of human Retroviruses. McKnight was a team leader in a large consortium funded by Bill & Melinda Gates to develop ‘A Neutralising vaccine for HIV’. Later she developed an interest in the post entry restrictions and innate immunity of viruses. Her group pioneered the development of whole genome screens for the identification of viral restriction factors and following this developed a program of research to understand the molecular interactions of HIV and restriction novel innate antiviral factors identified by her group. Since March 2020, the McKnight group’s focus has been on testing the neutralization and the virus-host interactions of SARs-CoV-2. The group has built the capacity in CL3 laboratories to investigate the biology of SARS-CoV-2 using live and pseudotype viruses. Her group have developed a number of serum neutralisation assays for SARS-CoV-2 including pseudovirus assays, live virus micro-neutralization and plaque assays. They have also developed specific assays that can monitor the tropism of SARs-CoV-2 and are in the process of developing similar assays for common human and bat coronaviruses.