Evasion of innate immunity by poxviruses

Speaker: Geoffrey Smith

Venue: Lecture Hall, Floor 1, School of Medicine, Zijingang Campus

Abstract: Professor Geoffrey Smith earned his PhD in 1981 at the laboratory of Alan Hay at the National Institute for Medical Research, London, UK (the predecessor of the Francis Crick Institute), focusing on the replication mechanism of influenza virus. Between 1981 and 1984, he conducted postdoctoral research at the laboratory of Bernard Moss at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. During this period, he pioneered the development of recombinant vaccine technology using vaccinia virus (the smallpox vaccine) as a vector, proposing the original theory of using genetic engineering to modify viruses as recombinant vaccines. This principle has since been widely applied to the development of vaccines against various viruses and microorganisms. Professor Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 and a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2011.

Professor Smith has served as Professor of Pathogen Microbiology at the University of Oxford, Head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London, and Head of the Division of Pathology at the University of Cambridge. In 2023, he returned to the Centre for Molecular Pathology at the University of Oxford to continue his research. In 2025, he joined the Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as Chief Scientist of the Vaccine Research Center at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Molecular Pathology, University of Oxford. His team’s main research directions include the interaction between poxviruses and host cells, the development of novel vaccines, and oncolytic viruses.