Dr Peter Balfe B.Sc. PhD

 

Senior Lecturer in Virology

School of Immunity and Infection

Contact details

Telephone +44 (0)121 414 8174

Fax +44 (0)121 414 3599

Email p.balfe@bham.ac.uk

School of Immunity and Infection
College of Medical and Dental Sciences
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

About

Peter Balfe is a Senior lecturer in Virology. 

He helped set up the HCV group at the Medical School where we've been since January 2005. The group includes 14 people at present (7 post-docs, 6 Ph. D. students and 1 technician) and occupies 3 adjoining labs on the 5th floor of the IBR building, 2 cat 3 labs and have shared access to all of the facilities in the MRC Centre for Immune Regulation. The group is involved in a wide range of collaborative studies both with colleagues within the medical school and elsewhere.

Peter’s own research investigates the sequence variation of HCV, with particular emphasis on the effects of sequence change on interactions between the virus and it's 4 receptors and on the recognition of the virus by the humoral immune response. He is also responsible for Virology teaching to undergraduates in the Medical School

Qualifications

  • PhD 1984
  • B.Sc. (hons) Biological sciences 1978

Teaching

Teaching Programmes

Postgraduate supervision

The HCV group is interested in supervising doctoral research (Ph.D.) students in the all areas of clinically relevant HCV disease

If you are interesting in studying in this subject area please contact us using the contact details above, or for more general doctoral research enquiries, please email: dr@contacts.bham.ac.uk or call +44 (0)121 414 5005.

For a full list of available Doctoral Research opportunities, please visit our Doctoral Research programme listings.   

Research

Research themes

Other activities

The HCV research group is actively engaged in a broad range of activities to involve and inform the wider community beyond the specialist audience for our HCV research. These activities range from organising local patient events for World Hepatitis Day (28th July) to school visits and University open days. Many of the group’s members are CRB accredited and visit local schools, both in response to invitations and via the national “STEMnet” scheme of which we are members. The Medical School has an active outreach committee chaired by our group (Peter Balfe) and runs regular events to promote the school’s work in the local area. These programmes are coordinated with the many other public engagement activities of the Medical School and with UoB Press and Outreach Offices, ensuring that scientific and clinically relevant breakthroughs are well publicised. These activities maintain both our laboratory and the University’s position as a key regional, national and international opinion leader.

In addition to postgraduate supervision and mentoring, the group is actively engaged in promoting virology teaching within the University, helping to organise all of the modules in this area to medical and science undergraduates across all years and personally delivering a third of the lectures. We run a successful, regularly updated, website detailing the work of the group (http://www.infection.bham.ac.uk/VRG/). For the last 4 years this site has been the first hit for “HCV research” on all major search engines. Our web pages are frequently accessed both by our own undergraduates and by the wider public, typically receiving up to 2-300 hits per week.

Publications

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