Bette Korber To Speak at Center For AIDS Research Seminar

Los Alamos National Laboratory Scientist and New Mexico Consortium affiliate Bette Korber will attend the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Seminar Series as the keynote speaker where she will present on “Emerging genetic diversity among SARS-CoV-2 viruses during the 2020 pandemic”. This seminar will be held this Wednesday, December 2, 2020 – 9:00 am PST.

Korber’s work focuses on viral evolution, the human immune response to infection, and vaccine design. She leads an interdisciplinary team that provides bioinformatics, theoretical, and statistical support in collaborative efforts with experimental researchers, working primarily on HIV, but also on ebola virus, hepatitis C, and influenza.

Korber recently focused her work on coronaviruses in response to the global pandemic. Some highlights from of her work include vaccine designs to cope with viral diversity, characterizing the evolution of HIV under immune pressure during infection, and developing sequence-based signature analyses methods that include phylogenetic corrections to compensate for founder effects. Her mosaic HIV vaccine design is currently being evaluated in a Phase 2b human clinical trial called Imbokodo, due to be completed in 2021.

Some of her awards and honors include: the E.O. Lawrence Award, the Dept. of Energy’s highest scientific honor (2004); the Secretary of the Dept. of Energy Award for her work on the Ebola Task Force (2017); the Richard P. Feynman Innovation Prize (2018); and R&D 100 Scientist of the Year (2018).

The monthly CFAR Seminar series is a new initiative launched by the CFAR leadership. The seminar series is held once monthly, and will vary in format and will include external and internal speakers.

To learn more about this event and how to attend over Zoom see: https://cfar.ucsf.edu/event/december-cfar-seminar-bette-korber-phd-cfar-science-spotlight-vitalant

Article by Carrie Talus