Peter Thomas

Background

About Peter Thomas

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, currently working in Dr Leo Swadling's T cell Vaccine lab, primarily analysing TCR repertoires for signatures of abortive infection that can assist the design of next-generation SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations. I also have projects involving development of epitope prediction tools, scRNA-sequencing analysis, and I formulate research plans for experimental work to enable downstream computational analysis. I completed my PhD and a Postdoctoral research rotation in Dr Laura McCoy's lab, also at the UCL IIT, focussing on the application of B cell repertoire sequencing to develop novel technologies for antibody discovery and to answer biological problems in human health and disease, such as how HIV infection affects vaccination responses. This aligns with my main research interest, namely the computational analysis of the immune receptor repertoires to define vaccine-specific responses and to assess the overall quality of the immune response, particularly within elderly populations. My PhD was a BBSRC funded iCASE PhD within the LIDo consortium. In collaboration between University College London and GlaxoSmithKline, I investigated methods to modify germinal centre output during immunisation and computational analysis of the vaccine specific B-cell repertoire for my PhD. Before my PhD, I spent 5 years within Kymab’s Antibody Discovery Group and was primarily involved with NGS of single and bulk B-cells for therapeutic antibody discovery. I am therefore highly experienced in practical and theoretical methods for antibody generation and repertoire analysis. I would welcome contact from academic or industrial groups about bioinformatics focussed positions, particularly within immunology.