After graduating from the University of Surrey in 2011 with a B.Sc. (Hons) in Microbiology Matt began his scientific career at Merial (a Boehringer Ingelheim company based in Pirbright) working on foot-and-mouth disease vaccines, blue tongue virus antigen production and quality control. As a senior analyst he performed virus titrations, serotyping, serum neutralisation assays and antigen enumeration. Moving away from virus work he progressed to site Environmental Specialist, a role focussing on biological contaminant monitoring, identification and trend analysis.
With 6 years of experience in industry Matt moved to the Pirbright Institute in 2018 to join the Non-Vesicular Reference Laboratory, led by Dr Carrie Batten, as a lab technician. Forming part of the diagnostics team Matt is responsible for performing PCR and ELISA investigations on submitted samples to scan for the presence of Arboviruses and the immune responses to infection and vaccination during routine surveillance. Other work within the NVRL includes virus titrations, SNTs, virus isolation and sample archiving. In addition to this he also contributes to the validation of proposed disinfectants, used in the control of foot-and-mouth disease virus and swine vesicular disease virus respectively, via plaque assay in collaboration with the APHA.
