UK IC Postdoctoral Research Fellowships 2021
The massive human health and economic toll caused by the COVID19 pandemic revealed just how vulnerable we are globally to natural or human-made pathogens. Keeping nations safe from another pandemic has become the defining global security aim of the decade. Identifying new disease threats and detecting those of unnatural origin will become a key focus, yet the studies into how to reveal these threats particularly in light of developments in artificial intelligence and natural language processing are sparse. Additionally, our scientific understanding of the human immune-system is now progressing at a rapid rate, allowing for the development of computational models that could predict the immune-systems of specific individuals.
Simultaneously, the 2 years have seen breakthroughs in our ability to predict protein structure from sequence, with tremendous implications for synthetic protein design. The elements are there for the synthetic refinement of proteins in natural viruses to hand tailor viruses to preferentially avoid or be visible to the immune-systems of specific ethnic groups.
Focusing on a type of immunity called the cell- mediated immune response, we propose to (1) develop and validate computational models that design proteins that modulate immune-visibility in ethnic groups (2) to develop strategies to detect the use of such models in synthetic protein design, and (3) To assess the risk that these algorithms could be adapted to avoid these methods of detection. To the best of our knowledge such models have not been explored before for this purpose.
Related content
View all programmesSupport for research
The Academy runs a number of grants to support excellent researchers carry out engineering activities and to enable clo…
UK IC Postdoctoral Research Fellowships
These Fellowships are designed to promote unclassified basic research in areas of interest to the intelligence, securit…