Dr. Robert Belshaw

Dr Belshaw began his career as an entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Moving to Imperial College London, he was one of the first researchers to use DNA sequencing for building phylogenetic trees in order to reconstruct and understand past evolutionary changes. Following the publication of the human genome sequence in 2001, he taught himself computer programming to work on human endogenous retroviruses.

These viruses proliferate by integration into their host’s germline and make up almost 5% of the 3 billion nucleotide-long human genome sequence. His research revealed factors that control their proliferation within host genomes, and showed that they are unlikely to be copying in the modern human population.

He continued this work at the University of Oxford, where he also taught infectious disease biology and tutored students at Worcester and Brasenose Colleges. In 2013, with advances in molecular biology allowing us to find causal links in complex disease, he moved to the University of Plymouth and collaborated with laboratory experimentalists to investigate the possible role of endogenous retroviruses in the immune system and in cancer. At Plymouth, Dr Belshaw also taught genomics and bioinformatics.

More recently he moved to Wenzhou-Kean University in China, where he taught several courses including general biology and started investigating the endogenous retroviruses in the Pangolin genome, which is one of China’s iconic animals and one of their most endangered.

Here at AUIB, he plans to continue his work on the Pangolin genome, investigating whether a unique loss of many immune genes in these animals has affected the number of viruses in their genome. He also hopes to pursue his long-term aim to exploit the observation that protein expression in these viruses is increased in most cancers and might provide a broad-spectrum anticancer immunotherapy.