Gorka Lasso (Group Leader)
Gorka Lasso is an Associate Professor in the Division of Infection & Immunity at University College London. His research is driven by a passion for understanding how protein sequence, structure, and function are linked—especially in the context of viral infectious diseases.
His scientific journey began with a broad interest in proteins across diverse biological systems, but since 2013, his focus has centred on viruses and their interactions with their hosts. During his postdoctoral work in the Honig lab at Columbia University (New York), he used a structure-based Bayesian network to predict and model the virus–human protein interactome, and developed a novel sequence-to-structure approach to reveal hidden virus–host structural relationships.
As a Research Assistant Professor in the Chandran Lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York), Gorka expanded his work to investigate the immunological properties of viral proteins and their role in disease. In addition, he and his team identified naturally occurring amino acid variants that shape filovirus susceptibility by integrating experimental approaches and machine learning to uncover the molecular rules underpinning the interaction between the viral glycoprotein and its receptor.
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Hana Andrew (co-supervised PhD student)
Hana is a PhD student in the McCoy lab. Her research interests include modelling epitope recognition by broadly neutralising antibodies in HIV.
Jiahe Lin (MSci student)
Jiahe is an MSci student in Human Sciences and Evolution within the Division of Biosciences. She is investigating the role of naturally occurring missense variations in humans in the context of coronavirus infection.
Charlie Barnes (iBSci student)
Charlie is a fourth-year Medicine student at the University of Brighton, currently intercalating in Mathematics, Computers, and Medicine at UCL. His research interests lie in predicting the zoonotic potential of newly discovered viruses.
Anna Ascsillan (BSc student)
Anna is a BSc student in Infection & Immunity, jointly supervised with the McCoy lab. She is studying broadly neutralising antibodies against HIV.