Lucy Gordon

Lucy received a BSc in Veterinary Biosciences at the University of Surrey. Throughout the course she became specifically fascinated by animal infectious diseases and the consequences of pathogen emergence and transmission on human and veterinary public health. She spent a year on placement at the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) in the badger tuberculosis group, where she developed a novel method to extract and subsequently test badger whole blood from filter paper without the need for any intrusive sampling steps.

Lucy is now undertaking a PhD at The Pirbright Institute in collaboration with The Roslin Institute at The University of Edinburgh. She is carrying out basic research into the immune response after FMDV infection compared to vaccination, using a mouse model. The current FMD vaccines induce only a short-lived immune response, however natural infection results in long-term protective antibody responses. One of the possible explanations for this difference is the constant antigenic boosting, due to virus persistence in infected animals, and this is what Lucy is investigating.