Agenda

Judith Breuer is Professor of Virology at UCL and Clinical lead for Virology at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Her research interests include the development of high throughput pathogen sequencing directly from clinical material for the analysis of pathogen evolution, identification of pathogen genetic determinants of clinical disease and to further understanding of the landscape of HCMV and EBV genetic variation. Professor Breuer worked for many years on varicella zoster virus and its vaccine, elucidating many aspects of VZV natural history and pathogenesis. She led the discovery of the VZV latency transcript (VLT) and is currently working to better understand how the vOka vaccine strain is attenuated for replication in skin. Prof Breuer has developed diagnostic metagenomic methods for pathogen discovery in patients with undetected infections of the brain and other tissues. This resulted in identification of adeno-associated virus 2 as the cause of the unexplained hepatitis that occurred worldwide in children in 2022. She has now extended this work investigation of hepatitis associated with AAV gene therapy and the putative role played by co-infection with herpesviruses. Through her clinical work she has developed a pipeline for the evaluation of new and repurposed drugs, including combinations for treatment of serious viral infections, particularly in immunocompromised individuals. Professor Breuer is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a member of the UK MHRA on COVID vaccines therapeutics, the JCVI committees on VZV and HPV vaccines and the UK Polio eradication committee. She chairs the JCVI Definitions of Immunosuppression Group.

Irene Goerzer is an associate professor of Virology at the Medical University of Vienna. She received her Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Vienna where she investigated the role of chromatin-remodelling complexes on gene expression. As a postdoctoral fellow she joined the Medical University of Vienna where she began working on human herpesviruses in Elisabeth Puchhammer’s lab. She started her independent laboratory on human cytomegalovirus at the Medical University of Vienna in 2013 and joined the lab of Barbara Adler at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich for a guest research fellowship in 2020. Her team’s research focuses on human cytomegalovirus strain diversity in clinical samples, the dynamics of mixed strain populations, and the impact of polymorphic genes on cell tropism.

Charlotte Houldcroft is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, leading the Virus Genomics group. Her PhD research was on Epstein-Barr virus latency at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, followed by postdoctoral research on cytomegalovirus and adenovirus at University College London and the University of Cambridge. Charlotte has an interest in how human genetic and immunological variation shape viral diversity, and how viral diversity in turn influences human evolution. She uses whole-genome sequencing to track the spread of viruses in space and time, and studies the ancient evolution of a range of successful human pathogens such as EBV, HSV-1 and adenoviruses.

Greg received his BA degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, which was supplemented with research experience at Amgen Pharmaceuticals. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania with Dr. Daniel Portnoy. This was followed by postdoctoral training at Princeton University, where he began his work investigating the neuroinvasive herpesviruses with Dr. Lynn Enquist with support from the Life Sciences Research Foundation. He supplemented his training in neurobiology at the Marine Biology Labs at Woods Hole. Greg established his laboratory at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago with initial support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and Schweppe Foundation. He co-founded Thyreos Inc to develop a new class of non-invasive herpesvirus vaccines and vaccine vectors for veterinary and human applications. His research is featured in the textbooks Molecular Biology of the Cell and Principles of Virology, and he is a fellow of the Chicago Innovation Mentors Program and the Henry Kunkel Society.

Yasuko Mori, MD, PhD who is a professor of Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, worked as an ophthalmologist at Osaka University Hospital and affiliated hospitals. There, she saw many patients with corneal herpes. and was involved in clinical research on HSV-1. Because she became interested in analyzing the pathogenesis of herpes virus, and entered Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine to conduct basic research on herpes virus. There, she met HHV-6, which became her life's research work. She was working on HHV-6 research under Professor Koichi Yamanishi, Afterwards, she was impressed by the HVEM discovery story at IHW, where she was a participant at the time, and started research on HHV-6 entry. It led to the findings of HHV-6A/B tetramer (ligand for HHV-6 receptor) and HHV-6B receptor (human CD134). After working as an associate professor at Osaka University, she assumed her current position. She has been conducting research on elucidating the infection mechanism of HHV-6A/B.

Kay Grünewald is Professor of Structural Cell Biology of Viruses at the Leibniz Institute of Virology (LIV) and University of Hamburg, Germany and scientific director of the Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB). He received his PhD from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and then did a postdoc with Alasdair C. Steven at NIH where he pioneered electron cryo-tomography (cryoET) of isolated pleomorphic viruses – Herpes simplex virus 1 being the first example – revealing their three-dimensional supramolecular organization. He then was a junior group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried, Germany before moving to the University of Oxford as Professor of Structural Cell Biology at the Wellcome Trust Centre of Human Genetics. In 2017 the group moved to Hamburg continuing to focus on the structural cell biology of selected aspects of herpesvirus-host interactions with a particular emphasis on membrane modulations.

Allison obtained her B.S. at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. She completed her Ph.D. in Biophysics with Samuel Butcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she worked to biochemically define the maturation of U6 snRNA. She then moved to the University of California, Berkeley as the Rhee Family Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation with Britt Glaunsinger. She opened her lab in the Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University in 2022, where she continues to use diverse approaches ranging from structural biology to functional genomics to understand late stages in the herpesvirus lytic cycle. Allison was recently awarded the Damon Runyon-Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists and a DP2 New Innovators Award from NIAID.

Ben Gewurz is an Associate Professor at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is the Associate Chair of the Harvard Graduate Program in Virology and an Associate Member of the Harvard Medical School Department of Microbiology. He is a founding member of the Broad Institute Center for Integrative Solutions in Infectious Diseases. Ben’s doctoral research with Hidde Ploegh and Don Wiley in the Harvard MD-PhD program focused on the molecular basis for cytomegalovirus (CMV) subversion of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I antigen presentation. He crystallized the CMV US2-class I MHC complex and solved the structure at 2.2Å, providing the first molecular view of a viral immunoevasin with its host target. Following infectious disease training, he pursued post-doctoral training with Elliott Kieff, where he performed the first genome-wide NF-kB pathway screen, which identified mediators of EBV Latent Membrane Protein 1 (LMP1) signaling. Key areas of interest in his laboratory include EBV-driven metabolism remodeling in EBV-driven B-cell transformation and gastric carcinoma, epigenetic control of the viral lifecycle, the EBV lytic switch, LMP1/NF-kB pathways and host cell remodeling to support lytic reactivation. Ben gave the Priscilla Schaffer Memorial Lecture at the 2017 IHW. He is a PLoS Pathogens Associate Editor and a member of the editorial boards of the Virology, the Journal of Virology, and Tumor Virus Research. He co-authors the Fields Virology chapter on EBV.

Stephen Graham is Professor of Virus:Host Interactions at the University of Cambridge, UK. His lab investigates how viruses alter the infected-cell environment, particularly the architecture and composition of cellular membranes, and how they achieve this without triggering cellular immune responses. His recent research has focussed on how HSV-1 stimulates membrane deformation during nascent particle envelopment and how it interacts with cellular components to promote virus cell-to-cell spread. Stephen’s team use a broad range of biochemical, biophysical and cell biology techniques, ranging from cell-based models of infection and proteomics to biophysical analysis and atomic-resolution structures of protein complexes. Stephen obtained his PhD in bacterial enzymology from the University of Sydney in 2006 before trading sunshine for drizzle with postdoctoral placements in Oxford (structural virology) and Cambridge (eukaryotic membrane trafficking).

Rob Kalejta is a Professor of Oncology and Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He completed a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry at The Pennsylvania State University, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Virginia working with Joyce Hamlin on cellular DNA replication origins, and postdoctoral studies as a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Fellow at Princeton University with Tom Shenk working on Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) modulation of the cell cycle. Rob has been a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease, an NIH study section member, and is a past organizer of the IHW (2016; Madison, WI). At UW-Madison he currently serves at the Vice-Chair of the Institute for Molecular Virology, the Assistant Director of the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, and the Co-Leader of the Human Virology Program of the Carbone Cancer Center. Rob is an Associate Editor for PLoS Pathogens and is on the Editorial Board of Viruses, and The Journal of Virology. He enthusiastically participates in missions that improve mentorship, diversity, and inclusivity in science. The Kalejta lab, which opened on 01 September 2003, studies HCMV chromatinization and epigenetics, latency and persistence, immune evasion, and cell cycle modulation. The Kalejta lab occupies land traditionally named Teejop (day-JOPE), the ancestral and contemporary lands of the Ho-Chunk nation, and actively maintains a diverse and inclusive workplace where all can feel empowered to be their authentic, whole selves.

Maria Kalamvoki received her Ph.D in Molecular Virology studying the non structural protein NS5A of hepatitis C virus at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and the Hellenic Pasteur Institute. She then pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in Virology in the laboratory of Dr. Bernard Roizman at the University of Chicago studying mechanisms by which HSV-1 evades the host. She then moved to the University of Kansas Medical Center, where she is currently an Associate Professor studying immunoevasion strategies of HSV-1.

Ileana Cristea is the Henry L. Hillman Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Her laboratory investigates host-pathogen interactions and mechanisms of cellular defense during infection with human viruses. Towards this goal, she has been at the forefront of promoting the integration of the fields of virology and proteomics. She has developed methods for studying spatial and temporal virus-host protein interactions, bridging developments in mass spectrometry to important findings in virology. For example, her laboratory has contributed to the emergence of the research field of nuclear viral DNA sensing in immune response, to uncovering mechanisms driving organelle remodeling and a mitochondria-ER encapsulation structure during infection, and to the discovery of sirtuins as antiviral factors for therapeutic intervention. Dr. Cristea is the Past-President of the American Human Proteome Organization (US HUPO), the past-chair of the Biology/Disease-driven Human Proteome Project (B/D-HPP) of HUPO, and the Chair of the Infectious Disease team of HUPO B/D-HPP. She has taught the summer Proteomics Course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for over ten years, and is Senior Editor for mSystems and Associate Editor for the Journal of Proteome Research. She was recognized with the Bordoli Prize from the British Mass Spectrometry Society (2001), NIDA Avant-Garde Award for HIV/AIDS Research (2008), Human Frontiers Science Program Young Investigator Award (2009), Early Career Award in Mass Spectrometry from ACS (2011), ASMS Research Award (2012), Molecular Cellular Proteomics Lectureship (2013), Mallinckrodt Scholar Award (2015), Discovery Award in Proteomic Sciences at HUPO (2017), and the Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award (2020).

Blossom Damania, Ph.D. is the Boshamer Distinguished Professor and Vice Dean for Research in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Damania’s research focuses on oncogenic human herpesviruses and host-pathogen interactions. She uses a multi-faceted approach towards understanding host innate immune responses to viral infection, as well as viral oncogenesis. Dr. Damania is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was also named a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences, USA.

Dr. Sallie Permar is the Nancy C. Paduano Professor and Chair of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and Pediatrician-in-Chief at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. She is also Professor of Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. A physician scientist focused on prevention and treatment of neonatal viral infections, she leads a laboratory investigating immune protection against vertically-transmitted viral pathogens, including HIV and cytomegalovirus (CMV). Dr. Permar has made important contributions to prevention of pediatric HIV transmission and has also defined determinants of congenital and perinatal CMV transmission, developing the first nonhuman primate model of congenital CMV infection and leading human cohort studies that have defined immune correlates of protection necessary to guide vaccine development. Dr. Permar received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, a Ph.D. in Microbiology/Immunology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and a Fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital in Boston. The author of over 200 peer reviewed publications, Dr. Permar has received several prestigious investigator awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society of Pediatric Research, and, in 2020, the Oswald Avery Award for Early Achievement from the Infectious Diseases Society of America. She was inducted into the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association of Advancement of Science. Dr. Permar serves on the board of the National CMV Foundation and is an institutional and national leader in physician-scientist training, serving as the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) Pediatric Scientist Development Program.

Dr. Awasthi is an Associate Professor, Research in Dr. Harvey Friedman’s laboratory in the Department of Medicine, Infectious Disease Division, Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Devi Ahilya University, India and post-doctoral training at Baylor college of Medicine, Houston, Texas and Rocky Mountain Laboratory (NIH), Hamilton Montana and University of Pennsylvania. She has been studying human herpes viruses and their strategies to evade host immune systems for over two decades. With Dr. Friedman and colleagues, she has exploited the viral immune evasion mechanisms to develop vaccine candidates against genital herpes. In recent years, in collaboration with Dr. Drew Weissman, they combined the modified nucleoside mRNA-LNP vaccine technology and immune evasion strategies and led a candidate vaccine to phase I trial for prevention of genital herpes. Dr. Awasthi is an active participant in the wider scientific community in many educational and advisory capacities including biotech companies. She has served on many national and international grant review study sections. She had been on the board of Association of Women in Science, Philadelphia Chapter.

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Felicia Goodrum is the Associate Department Head and a Professor in the Department of Immunobiology at the University of Arizona. She is the Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Virology and the immediate past President of the American Society for Virology. She received her Ph.D. from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and completed her postdoctoral training at Princeton University in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Shenk before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona. Her work seeks to define the complex virus-host interactions the define the mechanisms by which the beta herpesvirus, human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), enters and exists the latent infection and the host pathways important. The work of her laboratory has defined viral factors important to both latency and reactivation and defined host pathways, including growth factor signaling, innate immune responses, DNA damage responses, and sterol homeostasis that are targeted by these viral factors to control HCMV infection. Her work understanding viral latency has been recognized through the Howard Temin Award, the Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences Award, Kavli Young Investigators Award, and the Presidential Award for Early Career Scientists and Engineers. Dr. Goodrum in an active advocate for science and diversity in science.

Oren Kobiler received his M.D. (2006) and Ph.D. (2007) from the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, Israel. In 2007 he joined Lynn Enquist lab at Princeton University as a post-doctoral fellow. He opened his own lab in 2012 at the School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. The Kobiler lab is interested in mechanisms involved in determining the probability of an entering HSV-1 genome to initiate expression, replication and recombination.

Dr. Fortunato received her PhD from the lab of Dr. Suresh Subramani at UC San Diego, where she began her work on DNA double strand break repair/recombination and virus/cell cycle interactions. In 1995 she began her work on HCMV as a post-doc with Dr. Debbie Spector, discovering HCMV was one of only two viruses that induce site-specific breaks in the host DNA (on Chromosome 1), a phenomenon that has been a major focus of her lab, established in 2000 at the University of Idaho. Ultimately, she seeks to understand the long-term ramifications of HCMV/host interactions, hoping to elucidate the mechanism behind the development of CNS/PNS defects in congenitally infected infants. Her lab pioneered the use of neural progenitor cells to study HCMV, showing they were prematurely and abnormally differentiated after infection. Her lab recently published their ground-breaking work using iPSC-derived cerebral organoids, showing the dramatic effects early HCMV infection can have upon neural development. Her lab also recently published work on the interaction of HCMV with the basement membrane protein nidogen 1 (NID1), a gene encoded adjacent to the 1q42 breaksite. NID1 is a neurodevelopmentally important protein potentially linked to the development of CNS birth defects. The lab is now extending these 3D culturing methods to study myelination of peripheral neurons by co-cultured Schwann cells in an effort to explain the development of late-onset sensorineural hearing loss in congenitally infected infants. Dr. Fortunato has convened multiple sessions at IHW and previously served as a standing member on NIH Virology B.

Jia Zhu, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Washington School of Medicine. She obtained her PhD in Microbiology from Chinese Academy of Science, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, and completed postdoctoral fellowships in herpes virology with Dr. Nigel Fraser at Wistar Institute and Dr. David Knipe at Harvard Medical School. She then joined University of Washington and extended her scientific interests into human HSV-2 pathogenesis. Her lab studies in vivo intricate interactions between HSV and host immune responses in the tissue microenvironment. Early on she developed novel laboratory tools to dissect T cell mediated immune responses in tissue during genital herpes infection. These pivotal studies have provided plausible explanation of how local inflammation induced by chronic HSV reactivation increases HIV acquisition and why HSV-2 antiviral therapy fails to reduce HIV transmission. Her team has elucidated underlying mechanisms of immune surveillance and rapid containment through the discovery of tissue resident memory T cells in human skin and mucosa. Furthermore, her group has revealed that tissue resident memory T cells via antigen-specific recognition instruct innate and cell-intrinsic antiviral immunity to achieve tissue-wide protection. Recently, her lab has bioengineered a 3-D vascularized, biomimetic ‘Skin-on-Chip’ device, capable of immune-cell and drug perfusion. This platform could serve as an alternative disease model for preclinical evaluation of therapeutics and countermeasures, and for deciphering complex and diverse host pathophysiology in HSV infection.

Paul M. Lieberman, PhD is Professor and Program Leader of Gene Expression and Regulation at the Wistar Institute/Caplan Cancer Center and and Adjunct Professor of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Lieberman received his PhD from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Pharmacology/Virology and post-doctoral fellowship at UCLA in molecular virology. Dr. Lieberman’s research focuses on mechanisms controlling oncogenic herpesvirus persistence and genome maintenance. Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) persistent infection is associated with ~200,000 new cancers per year and autoimmune disorders, most notably multiple sclerosis. The Lieberman lab has developed small molecule inhibitors to block EBV latent infection and persistence. A critical factor in the control of EBV latency is the EBV-encoded protein EBNA1 that controls viral DNA replication, episome maintenance, and host-cell survival during latent infection. The Lieberman lab studies how EBNA1 controls viral DNA replication, gene transcription and promotes host-cell survival. Through support of the Wellcome Trust Seeding Drug Discovery Program, Dr. Lieberman led a team to develop a First-in-Class new chemical entity to treat EBV latent infection. The compound is presently in a Phase II clinical trial to treat EBV-associated nasopharyngeal carcinoma. New work focuses on understanding the role of EBV in multiple sclerosis and the potential for antiviral therapy. Dr. Lieberman is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Adam Grundhoff is a Professor at the Leibniz Institute of Virology (LIV) in Hamburg, Germany. He received his Ph.D. from the University of the Saarland in Saarbrücken, Germany. He subsequently joined the laboratory of Don Ganem at the University of California in San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2005, he became an independent junior group leader at the LIV and was promoted to Professor of Virus Genomics in 2012. In the same year, he received the “Loeffler-Frosch” Award for his work on the role of polycomb-repressive complexes (PRC) in KSHV latency establishment. The Grundhoff lab uses advanced imaging, genome manipulation, and sequencing techniques to interrogate complex viral infection systems. The principal goal of his research is to uncover fundamental principles of viral persistence and pathogenesis that are evolutionarily conserved across multiple DNA virus species. His current work focuses on epigenetic and transcriptional programming of viral and cellular chromatin during persistent infection with KSHV as well as other herpes- and polyomaviruses.

Dr. Daphne Avgousti completed her bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in biochemistry in 2006. She then went on to carry out her graduate studies at Columbia University, also in biochemistry, and completed her PhD in 2012. Her graduate work was focused on chromatin factors and their role in RNA interference in the model organism C. elegans. With a long standing interest in viruses, Dr. Avgousti then decided to pursue postdoctoral training asking how viruses hijack chromatin factors for viral benefit. She conducted her postdoctoral research under the mentorship of Dr. Matthew Weitzman at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where she received formal virology training and collaborated intensely with the Epigenetics Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine. In 2017, Dr. Avgousti moved to Seattle and started her independent research group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Here, Dr. Avgousti focuses on the mechanisms by which viruses hijack chromatin. The Avgousti lab works with different DNA viruses including herpes simplex virus and human cytomegalovirus as examples of nuclear-replicating DNA viruses that necessarily take over the resident genome and epigenome. Currently, the lab uses multidisciplinary approaches to address fundamental questions about how host chromatin is manipulated for viral benefit and the conservation of these mechanisms across different viruses. These approaches will inform both on how viruses takeover the cell and reveal unknown vulnerabilities in chromatin mechanisms that are exploited for viral gain.

Studied human biology and medicine at Philipps University Marburg, doctorate at Humboldt University Berlin, since then research scientist at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Department of Pediatric Oncology and Hematology. Main research interests: Herpesviruses, Cell cycle control, Virus-host interactions.

For more than 35 years, Dr. Ian Mohr’s research has featured virus model systems to investigate fundamental biological regulatory mechanisms that control gene expression and replication. Following completion of his graduate research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he received his Ph.D. degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty in the Dept. of Microbiology at New York University School of Medicine in 1996, where he is presently a Professor and member of the Cancer Institute. He directed the NIH-funded Infectious Disease & Basic Microbiological Mechanisms Training Program at NYU School of Medicine for 10 years, served on the International Herpesvirus Workshop scientific advisory committee, was NIH Virology A study section chair, and is presently on the editorial board of Journal of Virology and Genes & Development. Discoveries made in his NIH-funded laboratory include identifying unexpected host and virus-encoded factors that control anti-viral immunity, defining new molecular mechanisms whereby viruses manipulate host translation factors, demonstrating roles for specific host mRNA translation in viral infection biology, and establishing functions for mTOR-signaling in the biology of acute and persistent infections. Research in his lab focuses on molecular mechanisms that control herpes simplex virus latency in neurons and how post-transcriptional control of gene expression regulates virus infection biology.

Scott Tibbetts is a Professor of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology at the University of Florida, College of Medicine. He received his PhD in Microbiology & Immunology from the University of Kansas, where he investigated the function of T cell adhesion molecules in T cell biology and autoimmune disease. For his postdoctoral work, studies in virology and immunology, he joined the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was co-mentored by Skip Virgin and Sam Speck. There his work focused on harnessing the capabilities of the murine gammaherpesvirus MHV68 system to examine immune regulation of gammaherpesvirus infection in an in vivo context. His current research program is focused on using this system to dissect the complex interplay between these viruses and the host immune response, with a particular emphasis on defining the contribution of viral noncoding RNAs to chronic infection and tumorigenesis.

Dr. Noam Stern-Ginossar received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University, Israel, studying the functions of HCMV encoded miRNAs. She conducted her postdoctoral work with Jonathan Weissman at UCSF, mapping the coding capacity of HCMV by using ribosome profiling. She is currently a associate professor at the department of molecular genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The goal of her research group is to combine the power of novel high-throughput methodologies with targeted experiments to uncover the processes that occur in cells during infection, with a focus on HCMV

Britt Glaunsinger is a Professor at the University of California Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology. She is currently the Associate Chair of the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley. Dr. Glaunsinger holds the UC Berkeley Class of 1963 Chair for excellence in undergraduate teaching and was named a UC Berkeley Miller Professor as well as a Chancellor Professor. She has received several awards for her research, including the Howard Temin Career Development Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award, and the W.M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholars Award. Her dedication to culturally inclusive mentorship has been recognized through receipt of a campus-wide Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award. Her lab studies how herpesviral infection influences RNA biogenesis and fate to control host and viral gene expression. She is also passionate about clear science communication and holds regular workshops on this topic.

Moriah Szpara is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology, and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at the Pennsylvania State University. Szpara is part of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, in the Huck Institutes for the Life Sciences. She organizes the university’s Virology@PSU network. Szpara received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California Berkeley, with a focus on neuronal transcriptional responses. As a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Szpara trained with Dr. Lynn Enquist on neurotropic herpesviruses and viral comparative genomics. The Szpara lab at Penn State is focused on understanding how viral genetic diversity intersects with host differences and environmental factors to create the observed range of clinical outcomes from herpes simplex virus (HSV) infections. The Szpara lab also studies related agricultural and veterinary pathogens such as Marek’s disease virus (MDV), which enable comparisons across different systems of natural virus-host pairings. Research in the Szpara lab incorporates data from direct clinical and field samples, genomic and bioinformatics comparisons, and cellular and animal models for exploring viral biology. We work closely with clinician-scientist collaborators to connect our experimental studies with insights from the human clinical side of HSV infections. We are always looking for new trainees, so reach out if you are interested. Our open-source software packages for herpesvirus genome assembly and comparison can be found online at VirAmp (http://viramp.com) and VirGA (http://virga.readthedocs.org/). More information on the lab’s research can be found at http://szparalab.psu.edu/.

Dr. Christine Johnston is an Associate Professor in the Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine at University of Washington. She is an infectious diseases physician who performs clinical studies of herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection focusing on the intersection between viral pathogenesis and host immune responses, with the ultimate goal of developing successful vaccines and medications to prevent and treat HSV infections. She is also the Medical Director of the University of Washington STD Prevention Training Center, which is part of the CDC-funded National Network of STD Clinical Prevention Training Centers (NNPTC). Dr. Johnston was a subject matter expert for genital herpes and a co-author for the 2021 CDC STI Treatment Guidelines.

Dr. Clare Sample performed her postdoctoral studies in the lab of Dr. Elliott Kieff before joining the faculty in the Department of Virology and Molecular Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Institute. In 2006, she joined the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey. Dr. Sample’s research initially focused on identifying the functions of the EBV EBNA3 proteins. More recently, her lab has examined the lifecycle of EBV in stratified epithelium.

David Knipe is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Head of the Virology Program at Harvard Medical School. He was born and raised in rural Ohio and received his BA degree at Case Western Reserve University and PhD degree from MIT. His dissertation research on the mRNAs and pathways of maturation of vesicular stomatitis virus proteins was conducted with David Baltimore and Harvey Lodish. His postdoctoral research on molecular genetics with Bernard Roizman identified the repeated gene nature of the ICP4 gene by marker rescue and constructed an ICP8 ts mutant virus by in vitro mutagenesis. His lab at Harvard used ICP8 localization to identify replication compartments, showed that the HSV-1 LAT promotes heterochromatin association with the latent viral genome, that host factors IFI16, ATRX and PML serve as restriction factors that promote heterochromatin maintenance on the viral genome, and that ICP0 reduces heterochromatin on the viral lytic genome by promoting the degradation of host restriction factors. The lab constructed the HSV-2 dl5-29 replication-defective virus as a candidate genital herpes vaccine which was evaluated in a phase I clinical trial. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2021.