Vishwanatha Reddy

Biography

Dr. Vishwanatha Reddy is a Lecturer in Bioveterinary science in the School of Life Sciences at Keele University. Dr. Reddy spent his career researching poultry viruses, with a view to improving understanding of their pathogenesis and molecular biology, and leveraging this knowledge to strategically design vaccines for their control.

Dr. Reddy I hold a bachelor's degree in Veterinary Medicine (DVM) at the Bangalore Veterinary College, India, in 2007, after which he was awarded a scholarship from the Indian Veterinary Research Institute to pursue a master's degree in Biochemistry. Then, he subsequently obtained a PhD under Professor Hans Nauwynck at Ghent University, Belgium, on the pathogenesis of infectious bronchitis virus (IBV; avian coronavirus) and infectious laryngotracheitis virus (ILTV; avian herpesvirus), and he joined The Pirbright Institute as a Postdoctoral Scientist in 2016 to further his research on the molecular biology, immunopathogenesis, and vaccines of avian viruses. He initially focused on herpesvirus of turkeys (HVT), Marek’s disease virus (MDV; avian herpesvirus), and ILTV, under the mentorship of Professor Venugopal Nair and Dr. Yongxiu Yao, and then worked on IBDV (avian birnavirus) under Dr. Andrew Broadbent, and MDV under Prof. Shahriar Behboudi. In 2023, he was awarded the Pirbright Strategic Career Development Award to work on his own research project on understanding IBDV cell destruction pathways at the Pirbright Institute.

In the School of Life Sciences at Keele, Dr. Reddy aims to establish a program of work on the important immunosuppressive virus of poultry, IBDV, to strategically design vaccines to control IBDV infections by dissecting the underlying mechanisms behind IBDV-mediated cell destruction pathways in the bursa, and investigating how IBDV-mediated immunosuppression exacerbates the pathogenesis of secondary infections of zoonotic importance. In addition, to optimise the vectored vaccine potential of avian herpesviruses such as HVT and ILTV against IBDV, and other important poultry infections. In the long term, Dr. Reddy is interested in understanding the molecular basis of the pathogenesis of other poultry viruses to strategically design vaccines for their control.