DrClaire Dunican

I am a Post-doctoral Research Associate and Bioinformatician within the section of Paediatric Infectious Disease in the Department of Medicine. I joined Imperial as an undergraduate student in October 2014 and have since completed my Bachelors BSc (Biology), Masters (Bioinformatics) and my PhD (Infectious Disease) at the University.

My PhD specifically focused on developing new methods to predict patient prognosis from transcriptomic signatures in whole blood samples. My research area focuses on the transcriptomics of infectious disease in general, including understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying asymptomatic malaria infections and comparing human malarial infections to mouse models of disease at this level.

In 2022, I was joint-awarded, the Provosts Awards for Excellence in Animal Research along with colleagues from the section. I recently finished working on analysing RNA-Seq data generated from the DIAMONDS project and am hoping to expand the prototype analysis method developed during my PhD to a clinically viable prognostic tool. This is now a software tool on Github (DrClaireDunican/VeloCD) - and is freely available to the scientific community for use and development.

I am currently working on the transcriptomics, proteomics and radiomics of TB disease progression.

Selected Publications
Georgiadou*, A., Dunican*, C., Soro-Barrio, P., Lee, H. J., Kaforou, M., & Cunnington, A. J. (2022). Comparative transcriptomic analysis reveals translationally relevant processes in mouse models of malaria. eLife, 11, e70763. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.70763 Open Access Link

Patel*, H., Dunican*, C., & Cunnington, A. J. (2020). Predictors of outcome in childhood Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Virulence, 11(1), 199–221. DOI: 10.1080/21505594.2020.1726570 Open Access Link

*Denotes joint-first authorship