Professor Julian Druce

Julian Druce is a Senior Medical Scientist at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory, Australia. His laboratory has responsibility for detection of viruses affecting humans including respiratory viruses, herpes viruses, enteroviruses, flaviviruses, alphaviruses, pox viruses and many more. His work practices span Biosafety levels 2, 3 and 4 and he operates laboratories at all three levels. 

Julian completed a Master of Science and PhD in virology with focuses on public health harm reduction strategies for HIV transmission, disinfection and medical malpractice investigations, and methods for optimising detection of novel viruses in humans. 

His laboratory was the first outside of China to grow and share SARS-CoV-2 with laboratories around the world.  It was also one of the first laboratories to sequence SARS-CoV-2 and perform WGS from patient samples. The laboratory has a broad interest in virus WGS and evolution, with recent publications on flaviviruses, alphaviruses and parechoviruses.