Wellcome Career Development Award success for Dr Chris Hill
Posted on Thursday 16 July 2026
The highly competitive scheme provides funding for mid-career researchers who have the potential to be international research leaders, driving innovative programmes of work that can deliver significant shifts in understanding human health and disease.
The eight-year funding package will support Dr Hill’s exciting new project, titled “Structure and mechanism of translation initiation in picornavirus infection.”
When a virus infects a human host, its primary goal is to replicate. To do this, it must hijack the host cell's own machinery, specifically the ribosome, which is responsible for manufacturing proteins through the process of translation.
Dr Hill’s research group will deploy a suite of cutting-edge structural biology techniques to capture this process in unprecedented detail. By combining advanced technology such as cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), cryogenic electron tomography (cryo-ET), mass spectrometry, and single-molecule imaging, the team will look inside infected cells to map out the exact mechanisms that viruses use to take control.
By understanding at the atomic level how viruses synthesise proteins, Dr Hill’s research aims to pave the way for new types of medicine. Currently, many antiviral drugs target specific, fast-mutating viral proteins, which can lead to resistance. By uncovering the host-virus interactions taking place within ribosomes, Dr Hill’s team plans to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to design universal inhibitors of viral translation. If successful, this could lead to antiviral treatments capable of preventing a wide range of related viruses from replicating before they can cause severe illness.
Dr Hill said: "This Wellcome funding builds on the fantastic work of my team in deciphering how RNA viruses hijack host cells. These are complicated molecular puzzles with many moving parts - so the process must be studied in both space and time. This award will allow us to adopt new technology, including state-of-the-art cryogenic electron microscopy to directly visualise atomic details inside infected cells.”