Professor Richard Stanton

Richard is a Professor of Virology at Cardiff University Medical School. He is the head of infection research, and Director of the Wales Applied Virology Unit (WAVU), a newly formed unit that is funded by Health Care Research Wales. He has worked in Cardiff since first arriving as an undergraduate in 1995, before carrying out his PhD and post-doctoral research, then setting up his own research team in 2010. 

His research focusses on diseases caused by virus infection, in particular a virus called human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) that causes significant disease if caught during pregnancy, and in people having transplants. He also runs the high containment laboratory where his team research COVID19. He aims to understand how these viruses infect and spread within us, and how we can use the immune system to control them through vaccination and immunotherapies. He is particularly interested in how viruses manage to avoid being killed by our immune system, because preventing this will enable us to control them more effectively. 

He is highly collaborative, working with virologists, immunologists, proteomics experts, pharmacologists, drug developers, public health researchers, and clinical trial specialists, in order to ensure his research benefits patients. He has advised Welsh Government on virus disease in order to develop evidence-led policy, and acts as a consultant to multiple different pharmaceutical companies. He has been a regular media commentator for Welsh media, including BBC Wales, and regularly engages with the public through initiatives such as ‘Pint of Science’.