Presenter: Tom Parks - Clinical Senior Lecturer in Infectious Disease at Imperial College London

Title talk: Rheumatic fever: an auto-immune disease with complement at the heart?

Background: Tom Parks is an academic physician who did his doctoral research at what was then the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford. This was followed by clinical training in infectious diseases at teaching hospitals in London including the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. He is now a Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London where he holds a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship. He is interested in understanding how the genetics of the host influence susceptibility to infectious and inflammatory disease. The main focus of this work has been the diverse diseases caused by the human-restricted bacterial pathogen, Streptococcus pyogenes, which is also known as Group A streptococcus or Strep A.

His work uses a combination of array genotyping and short-read sequencing alongside more targeted long-read approaches. In the longer term, the goal is to be able to exploit these approaches to assist development of much needed vaccines and therapeutics to combat the substantial burden of disease attributable to Strep A and other infectious agents.