Maitreyi Shivkumar is a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology at the School of Pharmacy at De Montfort University. Her research interests are focused on understanding host–pathogen interactions, with a focus on virology. She completed her PhD on host entry and dissemination of herpesviruses in mouse models at the University of Cambridge. Following this, she was a post-doc at University College London studying HIV-1 spread between T cells before joining De Montfort University in 2019.