Professor Alex Borodavka

BSc, MSc (Kyiv), PhD (Leeds)

Tutorial Fellow

I undertook a Wellcome Trust-funded PhD at the University of Leeds, followed by a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship in Munich and periods of research in the USA. I then moved to Cambridge, UK, where I established my independent research group at the Department of Biochemistry in 2019 with support from the Royal Society and a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship. In 2023, I became Assistant Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, and I also joined the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) as Young Investigator Fellow, and I became a Fellow of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. I first visited Brasenose in 2025 as a DPhil thesis examiner from Cambridge, before joining Oxford and Brasenose two years later in February 2026.

I am an Associate Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Oxford, where I lead a laboratory at the Dunn School of Pathology investigating the molecular organisation, replication and assembly of segmented RNA viruses.

I teach Principles of Molecular Pathology and Biochemistry.

In the Department of Pathology, I run practical courses for BMII students, and teach virology, virus-induced immune pathology and related subjects.

My research asks a simple question: **how do viruses build themselves?** I study segmented RNA viruses, which carry their genetic information in several separate pieces. To reproduce successfully, they must copy those pieces, bring the correct ones together, and package them into new virus particles. I am interested in how they achieve this reliably inside the very crowded environment of an infected cell. In my laboratory, we combine virology with advanced microscopy and biophysical methods so that we can watch some of these processes happening in real time. In particular, we study how viral RNA molecules find one another, interact with proteins, and organise themselves inside specialised regions of the cell where virus replication takes place. This work is important for two reasons. First, viruses are remarkably efficient molecular systems and can teach us a great deal about how RNA and cells are organised. Second, by understanding the basic steps that viruses depend on, we aim to identify weak points in their life cycle that could eventually be targeted by new antiviral treatments.

https://www.borodavkalab.org/

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