Meet the Team
Arwen Altenburg, PhD
Wellcome Early-Career Award Fellow
Arwen obtained her PhD degree in 2018 from Erasmus MC (the Netherlands). Under the supervision of Prof Guus Rimmelzwaan, she investigated properties of the modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) vaccine platform and worked on MVA-based influenza vaccine candidates capable of inducing broadly protective immune responses.
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Arwen continued her research at the University of Cambridge as a postdoc. She joined the lab of Prof Geoffrey Smith to study vaccinia virus. October 2020, she moved to the lab of Prof Louise Boyle to work on the characterisation of TAPBPR function.
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January 2023, Arwen received a Wellcome Early-Career Award and started her lab researching MHC-I antigen processing and presentation in viral immune detection and evasion.
Dominic Nolan, MSc
Research Assistant
In 2014 Dominic graduated with a BSc Hons in Biology from Oxford Brookes University. Following a seven-year career in hospitality management, in 2021 he began an MSc in Clinical & Molecular Microbiology at the University of Nottingham. As part of the MSc program, Dominic was involved in a Hepatitis C Virus pseudotyping project in Professor Jonathan Ball and Professor Alex Tarr’s research group.
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Subsequently, Dominic developed technical expertise in cell sorting as a Flow Cytometry Assistant at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In March 2024, Dominic joined the Altenburg lab as a Research Assistant to investigate MHC-I antigen processing and presentation in viral immune detection and evasion.
Collaborations
​Rory de Vries
Erasmus MC, the Netherlands
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Sonja Buschow
Erasmus MC, the Netherlands
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Louise Boyle
University of Cambridge
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Brian Ferguson
University of Cambridge
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​Rich Stanton & Eddie Wang
Cardiff University
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