Dr. Virginia Marugan-Hernandez joined Professors Fiona Tomley and Damer Blakes’ lab at The Royal Veterinary College as a postdoctoral researcher in 2011, working in different molecular parasitology and vaccine development of Eimeria species. In 2017 she was appointed as Research Fellow in Veterinary Vaccinology in the Department of Pathobiology and Population Sciences. Virginia current research is focus on the biology and control of Eimeria parasites affecting chickens. She has optimised in vitro methods of infection and development for sporozoites of E. tenella and standardised RNA interference and inhibition assays for the investigation of functional roles of parasite and host proteins identified in the previous approaches for identification of new therapeutic targets. She leads research in transgenesis in E. tenella, developing protocols for the use of this parasite as delivery vector for antigens of other avian pathogens. She has improved the expression of antigens in transgenic parasites and used protein fusions with fluorescent reporters for protein localization that has significantly simplified the conventional procedures for protein characterization in this parasite.