It with great please that we welcome Yonca to the group. She is our second PhD student to start this year. This is particularly impressive as she managed to successfully relocate all the way from her home in Turkey to the UK during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. Yonca has a highly prestigious fellowship from the Turkish government and choose to study arbovirus infection with VHIT. She is establishing and using a new in vivo model of Toscana virus infection that uniquely incorporates salivary components derived from its natural vector the sand fly. Toscana virus is an import cause of infectious neurological disease in much of the Mediterraean and North Africa.
