Funding: Immunology and Infectious Disease

Several new awards have been made under the Wellcome Trust's Immunology and Infectious Disease funding stream, including:

Professor Doreen Cantrell, a Principal Research Fellow at the University of Dundee, has received renewed programme grant funding for her work on signal transduction pathways in T-cell activation. Also at the University of Dundee, Paul Crocker has had his Senior Research Fellowship renewed. Dr Crocker works on regulation of immune responses by 'siglecs' – molecules on immune cells that bind sialic acid residues on host cells.

Two new Research Career Development Fellowships have been awarded to researchers working in the tropics. Sandra Telfer (University of Liverpool), an ecologist, will be studying rat population dynamics and the spread of plague in Madagascar. Simon Brooker (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) will look at the complex interactions between malaria and hookworm infections in East Africa, and the possible impact of hookworm eradication on the incidence of malaria.

Enteric viruses were the focus of two new awards. Ian Goodfellow (Imperial College) has been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Science to follow up his valuable new system for engineering noroviruses, the cause of highly contagious gastroenteritis. And Peter Simmonds (University of Edinburgh) was awarded a project grant to study the geographical spread of human enteroviruses.