CVR Profiles: Meet Liam Brierley

Author: Lois Mason & Liam Brierley (02/07/2023)

We are excited to welcome Dr Liam Brierley to the CVR. Liam is an MRC Career Development Fellow and Royal Statistical Society Ambassador who is moving to Glasgow from the University of Liverpool. Read this blog to find out about Liam’s research, how his career in science began and all about his passion for Eurovision and putting boxes on participants’ heads!

Please summarise your main focus in your current position.

I do various things under the umbrella of computational virology, evolution, and biostatistics. But really what this means is that I use large repositories of data and new computational methods to try and learn new things about how and why viruses transmit between species (and particularly, to humans to cause epidemics and pandemics). My work asks questions like ‘can we train machine learning models to spot the genetic features that help viruses become zoonotic?’ and ‘how can we data mine systematic information that’s long been missing from our current models, like which tissues each virus can infect?’

How did you career/journey into science begin? 

I’ve always been interested in the natural world and at in the final year of my undergraduate Zoology degree I was amazed to find that viruses and other parasites all have ecology and biodiversity patterns like anything else! From then on I was set down a path of epidemiological modelling of multi-host pathogens. I also found my niche early – compared to other Zoology students I stood out as the one who chose to do the computational/statistical parts of projects. I was very happy sitting in the lab with a cup of tea writing code while my field peers went out and climbed all the hills, scrambled through the thorns, and got soaked in the rain collecting samples.

What's a fun fact about yourself? 

I’ve seen all the Eurovision Song Contest. Every. Last. One. All the way back to Lugano, 1956!

What is your favourite scientific fact?

Hard to give a favourite but I’m still astounded by just how much viral material we can find in old samples. We didn’t know about Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (another Betacoronavirus like SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2) until the first outbreak in 2012, and then we found antibodies to MERS-CoV in archived camel serum from 1983 (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/12/14-1026_article ). And thanks to material recovered from burial sites in Alaskan permafrost, we now know the genetic sequence of the influenza virus that caused the catastrophic flu pandemic in 1918 – a time over thirty years before we even understood what DNA was. (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html )

Is there anything else you would like to share? 

I also do a lot of public engagement and scientific outreach, which takes a lot of forms – sometimes it’s comedy, sometimes it’s media interviews and advising on TV/radio pieces, sometimes it’s live science demos with the help of a volunteer with a box on their head.