Morgane Rolland, Ph.D.
Chief, Viral Genomics Section and Systems Serology Core
U.S. Military HIV Research Program (MHRP)
James Riley, Ph.D.
Professor of Microbiology
Perelman School of Medicine
Wenjun Li, Ph.D.
Professor, Director – Health Statistics and Geography Lab
Department of Public Health, Center of Biomedical and Health Research in Data Sciences (CHORDS)
Health Statistics and Geography Lab, UMass, Lowell
Jonathon Karn, Ph.D.
Dr. Karn is an internationally-recognized virologist who has made seminal contributions to the study of transcriptional control in HIV. Between 1989 and 1993 Dr. Karn made the important discovery that the HIV regulatory proteins Tat and Rev are RNA binding proteins and demonstrated how this binding activity was essential for their biological activities. Recently, the Karn laboratory has established new model systems for studying HIV latency and demonstrated how epigenetic restrictions are used to silence HIV transcription. As part of a recent amfAR ARCHE study he demonstrated that estrogen receptor is a critical factor controlling HIV transcription. Dr. Karn is the Director of the CWRU/UH Center for AIDS Research since 2008. He served as a member of the NIAID Advisory Council and NIAID AIDS Research Advisory Council between 2011 and 2015 and appointed to the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors Basic Sciences for 2015-2020. He was a member of the NIH AMCB study section from 2003 to 2007, serving as Chairman from 2005-2007. He was a member of the ACTG Transformative Science Group (TSG) on HIV Cure strategies (2011-2015) and the Martin Delaney CARE Collaboratory. From 1987 to 1998 he played a leading role in the establishment and coordination of the UK’s research effort into AIDS as a member of the MRC AIDS Directed Program Steering Committee. Dr Karn is a member of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. He was the Executive Editor of the Journal of Molecular Biology from 1989 to 2002 and is currently on the editorial board of Virology. Dr. Karn has mentored 8 graduate students, 32 postdoctoral fellows and 2 research associates since 1980. The laboratory currently has 2 graduate students, 2 postdoctoral scholars, 5 research associates and 3 research assistants. He was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Microbiology in 2011.
Alex Shalek, Ph.D.
Core Member, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), MIT
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Extramural Member, The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Member, Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard
Institute Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Assistant in Immunology, Massachusetts General Hospital
Instructor, Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard Medical School
Alex K. Shalek, PhD, (pronouns: he/him/his) received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in chemical physics under the guidance of Hongkun Park, and performed postdoctoral training under Hongkun Park and Aviv Regev (Broad/MIT). His lab’s research is directed towards the development and application of new approaches to elucidate cellular and molecular features that inform tissue-level function and dysfunction across the spectrum of human health and disease. Dr. Shalek and his work have received numerous honors including a NIH New Innovator Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Searle Scholar Award, a Pew-Stewart Scholar Award, the Avant-Garde (DP1 Pioneer) Award from the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, as well as the 2019-2020 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award at MIT and the 2020 HMS Young Mentor Award.
Serena Spudich, M.D., M.A.
Gilbert H. Glaser Professor of Neurology
Yale School of Medicine
Rasmi Thomas, Ph.D.
Chief, Laboratory of Integrative Multiomics
US Military HIV Research Program (MHRP)
Dimiter Dimitrov, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Medicine
Director, Center for Antibody Therapeutics
University of Pittsburgh
Major research interests are to identify and characterize novel human monoclonal (mA) as candidate therapeutics as well as to develop novel strategies to increase their safety and efficacy
Paula Cannon, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology
Keck School of Medicine of USC
Paula Cannon, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology in the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the use of gene editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 to manipulate hematopoietic cells, with the goal of developing novel treatments for HIV. Most recently, her group has been editing human and macaque B cells to express completely customized antibodies, including antibodies with broadly neutralizing activity against HIV. Such a platform could turn B cells into factories in the body to secrete antibodies with desirable properties, including those that are not easily generated by vaccination. In this way, her work complements ongoing studies aimed at identifying regimens of broadly neutralizing antibodies that could provide long-term suppression of HIV.
Galit Alter, Ph.D.
Galit Alter, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in Medicine at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard and leads a laboratory that collectively works towards the single goal of developing novel vaccine approaches aimed at recruiting and directing the antiviral activity of the innate immune system to kill virally infected cells. Dr. Alter received her Ph.D. in Experimental Medicine from McGill University and performed her post-doctoral work under Dr. Marcus Altfeld at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of the innate immune response and the adaptive humoral immune response, with a focus on defining the role of innate immune recruiting antibodies in providing specificity to the innate immune system to kill virally infected cells. Specifically, Dr. Alter’s work focuses on developing high-throughput assays aimed at dissecting the “protective profiles” and functional activity of polyclonal pools of antiviral antibodies induced via vaccination or during natural infection. To this end her laboratory has established high-throughput assays that simultaneously interrogate the functional activity of polyclonal pools of antibodies in tandem to defining the biophysical features of the most functional humoral immune responses. Together, Dr. Alter utilizes these data to then selectively purify the most “protective” antigen-specific B cells for RNA sequencing, to enable to production of the most potent therapeutic antibodies and to learn about the underlying mechanism by which protective B cell responses are programmed to aide in the development of next generation vaccines that may direct the antiviral activity of the innate immune response.