Who we are

This network is led by students at Imperial College London and supported by staff. Each faculty has a student research network manager representative, who is the main point of student contact for the faculty within the network. All students at Imperial College London are welcome to join the network, so if you are interested please feel free to contact your student network manager representative.

Current Student Research Network Managers

Jiayun Xu – Faculty of Medicine

I am a PhD student in the Department of Infectious Disease, supervised by Prof. Christopher Chiu and Prof.

Cecilia Johansson. My project focuses on studying mucosal and systemic immunity following human influenza virus challenge and live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) administration. By comparing immune responses induced by infection and vaccination, we aim to identify factors that explain the incomplete and short-lived nature of LAIV-induced protection, thereby contributing to the development of improved future vaccines.
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Simon Daniel - Faculty of Engineering

I am a PhD student at the Sargent Center for Process Engineering. After graduating in Life Sciences Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, I worked in the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub to develop a new framework for RNA vaccines development. I then joined the CEPI-Wellcome Leap’s R3 program to implement process digital twins in rapid-response RNA vaccine platforms. Under the supervision of Prof. Nilay Shah and Prof. Cleo Kontoravdi, my current research focuses on modelling new production processes, the development of innovative soft sensors for vaccine formulation, and the transition to continuous RNA manufacturing. Email

Narges Mohammadi - Imperial Business School

Narges is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Analytics and Operations at Imperial College Business School. She is a member of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Innovation (CHEPI) at Imperial College. Her research interests are medical decision-making and healthcare operations. Narges is utilizing methodologies such as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), Partially Observable MDPs, and simulation techniques to build models that drive insight in the healthcare field.
Email

Tom Kitto - Faculty of Natural Sciences

I am a third year PhD student in the department of chemistry. My research focuses on bottom up synthetic biology and chemical biology - I work with many of the technologies that enabled the novel mRNA COVID vaccine.
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International partnerships

Dr Yaw Aniweh - WACCBIP, University of Ghana

Dr. Yaw Aniweh is a Senior Research Fellow at the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogen and the Director of the sister Vaccine Student Research Network (VSRN) at the University of Ghana. His research focuses on understanding host-pathogen interactions, disease pathogenesis, drug and vaccine target discovery, diagnostics and delineating the DNA-damage-response-repair pathway in Plasmodium species.