George E. and Lucy Becker Professor in Medicine

Stanford University - Stanford, CA

Catherine Blish is a Professor of Medicine and Immunology and the Associate Dean for Basic and Translational Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also the Co-Director of the Stanford MD-PhD Program and an Investigator of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. As an undergraduate she studied biochemistry at the University of California, Davis, before completing her MD and PhD at the University of Washington, followed by residency in internal medicine and fellowship training in infectious diseases at the University of Washington. Her research is dedicated to learning how to harness the immune system to prevent and cure diseases. Her lab studies host-pathogen interactions, with a particular focus on innate immune responses to a diverse array of pathogens including HIV, dengue virus, influenza, tuberculosis, and SARS-CoV-2. Building on her skills in human immunology, clinical infectious diseases, and microbial pathogenesis, her lab’s studies bring comprehensive immune profiling techniques such as mass cytometry (CyTOF) and single cell RNA-sequencing to clinical and epidemiologic studies of infection, vaccination, and pregnancy. Her lab takes a particular interest in studying “experiments of nature” to define the role of immune factors in disease pathogenesis by evaluating immune responses in “special populations” such as pregnant women and babies exposed to HIV. Her lab is particularly well-known for redefining our understanding of the diversity and specificity of human NK cells. She divides her time between research, clinical practice in infectious diseases, teaching, and her administrative roles. She has received numerous awards for research and mentoring, including the Stanford Immunology Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and the NIDA Avant-Garde Award for HIV/AIDS Research. She is an elected a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians.

Professor of Molecular Immunology

University of Oxford - Oxford, United Kingdom

Prof. Dustin has a BA in Biology from Boston University (1984) and a PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from Harvard University (1990). He studied glucose transport in red blood cells for his undergraduate thesis with Scott W. Peterson and studied biochemistry and regulation of lymphocyte adhesion molecules during his PhD with Timothy A. Springer. He completed post-doctoral training with Stuart Kornfeld on lysosome structure and function at Washington University School of Medicine (1993). Dr. Dustin led his own group at the Department of Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine under Steve Teitelbaum and Emil Unanue from 1993 to 2000. While at Wash U, he led a collaborative group in discovering requirements for the T cell immunological synapse with Andrey Shaw, Paul Allen, Mark Davis (Stanford) and Emil Unanue. He moved his lab to the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University School of Medicine in 2001. He collaborated on new intravital microscopy projects with Wenbiao Gan, Dan Littman, Juan Lafaille, Michel Nussenszweig, Dorian McGavern and Sandra Demaria among others. Continuation of work on the immunological synapse led to a basic description of the supramolecular assemblies that make up the mature immunological synapse. Specialized functions of the immunological synapse in cytotoxic T cells and regulatory T cells were also explored. He was director of the NIH-funded Nanomedicine Center for Mechanobiology from 2009-2014. In order to further advance studies on the immunological synapse and translation to treatment of human diseases he moved to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford in 2013 supported by a Principal Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust.

Professor of Medicine, Herman and Louise Smith Distinguished Professor & Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Chapel Hill, NC

Dr. Eron is the Principal Investigator of the HIV/AIDS Clinical Research Unit at UNC-CH and the Director of the Clinical Core for the UNC Center for AIDS Research (CFAR). He has been part of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group since 1993 and has held multiple leadership positions including Chair of the Optimization of ART Committee and the Cure Transformative Science Group. He is the Principal Investigator of the UNC Clinical trials Unit with sites in Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Lilongwe Malawi and Hanoi Vietnam. In addition, he is a leader of the UNC Acute HIV Infection research team and is a collaborator in the UNC HIV Cure initiative. Over the last 15 years Dr. Eron has led the development of the UNC HIV CFAR Clinic Cohort that includes over 5000 HIV infected individuals and has active collaboration and membership in the NA ACCORD and CNICS cohorts. Dr. Eron has over 400 publications in peer-reviewed journals focusing on antiretroviral therapy, resistance, pharmacology, transmission and HIV persistence and disruption of latency. Recent work has included publications from the UNC CFAR HIV Clinical Cohort, the ACTG, HPTN and IAS-USA HIV treatment guidelines in JAMA 2020. Dr. Eron has worked extensively in the area of HIV drug development and led or participated in original studies of many antiretroviral therapies. He also continues as an active HIV and Infectious Disease clinician. He is now the leader of the ACTG Scientific Agenda Steering Committee and is Vice Chair (co-PI) of the ACTG network.

Professor of Medicine and Microbiology

University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, PA

Dr. Hahn is internationally recognized for her work deciphering the primate origins of human AIDS viruses and malaria parasites. She is known in particular for developing non-invasive methods to study the evolution, biology, and potential of microbes that infect endangered primate species to be transmitted to humans. Dr. Hahn received her medical degree from the Technical University of Munich and pursued postdoctoral studies in human retrovirology at the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology, National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. She joined the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology at the University of Alabama in 1985, serving as co-director of the Center for AIDS Research from 2003 to 2011. Hahn became a Penn faculty member in 2011. Her influential contributions in understanding human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections include developing the first molecular clone of HIV-1, discovering the origins of HIV-1 and HIV-2 in non-human primate species in Africa, determining the pathogenic impact of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) infection on wild chimpanzee populations, and making fundamental observations in the molecular and virologic characterization of numerous HIV and SIV genes and strains. Hahn’s most recent work describes ground-breaking studies identifying the origin of the most deadly form of malaria in West African gorillas, findings that will prompt new research to understand host/pathogen interactions that underlie the transmission and pathogenicity of malaria. Dr. Hahn has published over 300 papers and is a member of many advisory boards, including the HIV/AIDS Program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She also served on the NIH Council of Councils Working Group on the Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-Supported Research. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2002, she was named one of the top 50 women in science by Discover Magazine.

Professor of Medicine

University of California San Francisco - San Francisco, CA

&

Head, HIV Frontiers Program

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Joseph (“Mike”) McCune is Head of the HIV Frontiers Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. After studies at Harvard College (with Jack Strominger, leading to an AB in biochemistry) and at the Rockefeller University (with Henry Kunkel and Gunter Blobel, leading to a PhD in cell biology and immunology), he started to treat patients with HIV disease as a resident in internal medicine at UCSF from 1982-1984 and has been involved in the HIV/AIDS research field ever since. This work included postdoctoral studies with Irv Weissman at Stanford (1985-1988), exploring the fusogenic properties of the HIV envelope protein and invention of the first humanized mouse model (the SCID-hu mouse) capable of multilineage human hematopoiesis and receptive to infection with primary isolates of HIV, and was continued in companies that he co-founded (SyStemix in 1988 and Progenesys in 1991) and at which he served first as CEO and then as a Scientific Director. In 1995, Dr. McCune returned to academia as an investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and then (starting in 2006) as the Chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine (which he founded) at UCSF. Concomitantly, he was the founding PI (and Senior Associate Dean) of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute at UCSF (from 2005-08). In recent years, he has helped to form multidisciplinary, collaborative research teams to find a cure for HIV disease, first in the context of NIH- and amfAR-funded “collaboratories” at UCSF (2010-2016) and then as Head of the HIV Frontiers Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2018-present). Throughout this time, he has taken care of patients with HIV disease at the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS Clinic/Ward 86 and has also actively mentored graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in academia or biotech/pharma. Dr. McCune’s studies have led to the publication of over 280 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, and he is the holder of 21 patents and inventions. On the basis of this work, he has been awarded the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation Scientist Award in 1996, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research in 2000, a MERIT Award from the NIH in 2001, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2004, a Gates Grand Challenges Explorations Phase II Award in 2011, and a number of mentoring awards for his activities with junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. He is a member of many scientific and professional societies, including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Association of Physicians, and the Henry Kunkel Society. He has also served on the editorial boards of multiple scientific journals. He has served as a board member for a variety of organizations, including The Rockefeller University, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Project Inform, Project Open Hand, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the Foundation for AIDS and Immune Research, the Foundation for Vaccine Research, the Alliance for Lupus Research, the Immune Tolerance Network, the Bluefield Project to Cure Frontotemporal Dementia, and for the biotechnology companies, SyStemix, Progenesys, and Prosetta.

Professor and Victor Daitz Chair in HIV/TB Research

University of KwaZulu-Natal - Durban, South Africa

Dr. Thumbi Ndung’u is the Director for Basic and Translational Science at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in Durban, South Africa. He is Professor and Victor Daitz Chair in HIV/TB Research at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal. He holds the South African Research Chair in Systems Biology of HIV/AIDS. He is Professor of Infectious Diseases at University College London. He is an Adjunct Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is an Associate Member at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He is also the Programme Director of the Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence (SANTHE), a research and capacity building initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. He graduated with a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and obtained a PhD in Biological Sciences in Public Health from Harvard University, United States. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Virology at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and a fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. His research interests are host-pathogen interactions, particularly immune mechanisms of HIV and TB control. The ultimate goal of this work is the development of immune-based prophylactic, treatment and cure strategies. He has co-authored more than 270 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals. He has received grant funding from the South African National Research Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust among others. He has special interest in capacity building for biomedical research in Africa.