This series of short café talks forms part of Imperial Lates: Xmaths, a festive evening celebrating Mathematics at Imperial. Register here for more information on this latest Imperial Late, including an exclusive full line up of exhibitors and the workshops, demonstrations and talks they will be running so you can plan your evening in advance.
Please note, registering for the Lates event doesn’t guarantee you a seat at any of these cafe talks. These will be allocated on a first come first serve basis on the night so please arrive 10 minutes in advance of your preferred talk time to guarantee your seat.
For hundreds of years, deadly infectious diseases have been evading the human immune system with their ability to mutate and change extremely rapidly. This very trait may well be their Achilles’ heel, thanks to new technologies developed at Imperial and beyond.
HIV in particular has remained largely uncontrolled, with more than 100,000 people living with the virus in the UK and an estimated 1.8 million new infections worldwide in 2017. The virus is evolving its genetic code so quickly that each infected individual tends to have virus characteristic of that individual. The revolution that mapped the human genome is now making it increasingly easy to sequence the viruses themselves, trace back who may have infected whom in population-based samples, and thus design precise interventions to stop epidemic spread.
At Imperial Lates, statistician Dr Oliver Ratmann will be giving talks about this remarkable new technology, the latest mathematical methods used to make sense of the data, and how it all may help to win the fight against HIV and other infectious diseases.
Talks will start in the College Café at:
- 6:30pm
- 7:00pm
- 7:30pm