Dr Kevin Maringer

Kevin is a molecular virologist and immunologist interested in how virus-host interactions in mosquito vectors drive arbovirus transmission and emergence. His work focusses on the flavivirus dengue virus (the most prevalent mosquito-borne virus affecting humans) and its primary mosquito vector Aedes aegypti. Kevin has made contributions to our understanding of how flaviviruses cause disease in humans by altering cardiovascular biology, immune and cellular stress responses. He also developed new bioinformatics and molecular tools to study how flaviviruses modify the biology of their vertebrate vectors to enable disease transmission.

Kevin graduated with a degree in Medical Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick in 2007. He completed his PhD in the lab of Professor Gill Elliott at Imperial College London, where he studied herpes simplex virus particle assembly. After graduating from his PhD in 2011, Kevin secured a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust to develop his dengue virus research programme in the labs of Professor Ana Fernandez-Sesma (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York) and Dr Andrew Davidson (University of Bristol). Kevin established his own research group at the University of Surrey in 2016 and joined The Pirbright Institute as a group leader in 2020.

Kevin is passionate about making science accessible to the public and has contributed to program development at the BBC and science policy activities at the Microbiology Society. He has championed diversity in the life sciences through blogs and youth programmes in New York City and England.