Research Interests
Globally, there are more than 30 million individuals living with HIV/AIDS, a number that is growing by approximately 3 million each year. The overarching goal of my laboratory is to contribute meaningfully to the global response to HIV. Though HIV is ultimately a preventable disease, the sheer number of new HIV infections demonstrates that a prophylactic vaccine is desperately needed to augment existing prevention programs. Most vaccine concepts are prototyped in macaques infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). Therefore, our laboratory studies both SIV-infected macaques and HIV-infected people.
Our interests include HIV/SIV genetics, virology, immunology, and pathogenesis. Ongoing projects include:
• Lymphocyte adoptive transfers to define the correlates of protective immunity
• Expanding our knowledge of nonhuman primate genetics
• Understanding the variability in HIV/SIV disease progression among individuals
• Applying SIV research concepts to the study of HIV+ patients