Mary Wu

The Francis Crick Institute

Mary leads the Viral & Immune Surveillance Platform at the Francis Crick Institute. After a PhD with Caroline Hill, she held a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship with Jim Smith at NIMR, then brought her expertise in screening and cell-based assay design to the Crick’s High Throughput Screening STP. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she built the Crick’s microneutralisation platform, generating data behind 25+ publications and informing SAGE and JCVI policy decisions. Her five-person team now applies the platform across translation, research and public health projects in infectious disease, from antiviral drug testing with partners including AstraZeneca, GSK and Google DeepMind to mucosal neutralisation assays from nasosorption samples, which aim to support mucosal vaccine development. Their work contributes to the Crick’s role in the 100 Days Mission for pandemic preparedness, and they are now developing flow virometry on the NanoFCM to characterise viruses at the single-particle level.