Washington University in St. Louis (WU)
I have studied vesicular stomatitis virus platform for development of countermeasures against emerging enveloped viruses. The experience gained in the field has been recently and successfully translated in dissecting host factors for cell entry and assembly of SARS-CoV-2 and the immune response against SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 patients. I have worked with colleagues in humoral immune response after COVID-19 vaccination and/or infection and definition of neutralizing antibody epitope and characterization of immune escape and developing broadly cross-reactive monoclonal antibody against variants of concern (VOCs). These joint efforts led to several publications in prestigious journals such as Cell Host & Microbe (Liu et al., 2021) Nature (Alsoussi et al., 2023) and Immunity (VanBlargan et al., 2021). My current research interest focus on these three field: 1) Identification of novel viral and host regulators for viral infection; 2) Definition of neutralizing antibody epitope and identification of escape mutations; 3) antiviral countermeasures development.