Dr Jillian Cooper

Dr Jillian Cooper has been a principal scientist in the division of Virology since 2001 when the CJD resource centre was established at NIBSC.  She has overseen the generation of reference reagents for use in the evaluation of tests intended for the diagnosis of vCJD.  Together with other national and international TSE groups, who oversee the work of the resource centre, a protocol has been established to determine fair and appropriate access to extremely rare samples from clinical cases of vCJD. The resource centre works closely with test developers to ensure sample requirements are met.

Jillian has a special interest in protein misfolding disorders and has over 15 years’ research in this area. During a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine she established a cell culture model of disease related aggregation for Huntington’s disease and investigated possible mechanisms of cell death associated with disease. 

Jillian is a molecular biologist by training and obtained her PhD in the Department of Virology at the University of Glasgow working on Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV).