DrLucas Huggins

Lucas is a Research Fellow whose work focuses on the global testing and rollout of a novel diagnostic and sequencing tool for poliovirus with the overarching aim of detecting disease outbreaks faster and hastening progress towards polio eradication. He works within the Vaccine Epidemiology Research Group (VERG) in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology within Imperial's School of Public Health. He is currently advancing the continued development and validation of direct detection methods for polio and other enteric pathogens from both stool and wastewater samples, helping to improve sensitivity and robustness. He also works closely with international partners to support the rollout of these methods across laboratory networks across Africa and Asia. 

Lucas has previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Fellow within the Department of Veterinary Biosciences at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Here, his research was centred around the development of portable pan-pathogen diagnostic tests for companion animals with the overarching aim of safeguarding Australia against vector-borne disease bioincursions via the use of third-generation sequencing technology such as Oxford Nanopore's MinION device.

Prior to this Lucas completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne Veterinary School in 2021 where he conducted a project exploring the vector-borne pathogens (VBPs) of mine detection and stray dogs in Cambodia. This research has allowed him to design and develop numerous molecular diagnostic methods, including a pan-protozoan and pan-bacterial metabarcoding method for canine pathogen detection as well as a multiplex qPCR assay for the common dog-infecting VBPs of the Asia-Pacific. Over his PhD Lucas was awarded the Sir Ian Clunies Prize for outstanding academic achievement in the field of veterinary parasitology. Prior to his move to Australia, Lucas graduated from the University of Manchester, UK with an MPhil in Animal Biology and a BSc in Zoology with industrial experience. Over this period his research focused on the development of diagnostics for herpetofauna-infecting nematodes as well as the use of such diagnostic for ex situ captive breeding efforts.