New Primary Investigators Bolster Wistar’s Research
Three new PIs have recently joined Wistar, helping to further advance research into HIV and cancer.
Qingsheng Li, Ph.D., joined as a professor in the HIV Cure and Viral Diseases Center. Li analyzes the complex immune response to HIV pathogenesis and studies HIV transmission to better understand virus – host interaction. He’s interested in one of the biggest challenges to the field: HIV virus latency (when the virus is dormant in a cell), why it reactivates and how it infects surrounding tissue. He uses genome engineering tools like CRISPR as well as RNA technologies to advance new immunotherapies.
Simon Chu, Ph.D., joined as Caspar Wistar Fellow in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center. Chu’s research focuses on genomics data analysis, through the creation and design of novel computational programs and applied machine learning, to uncover and interpret cancer and infectious disease research and identify drug discovery potential. Chu is interested in the genome and within it transposable elements or “jumping genes” that can rearrange themselves to alter gene expression and impact function. He creates algorithms to investigate why and how these genetic changes happen and their implications in disease.
Finally, Katherine Aird, Ph.D., joined Wistar as co-leader and professor in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center. Dr. Aird, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Wistar from 2012-2016 prior to the start of her independent research career, focuses on cancer metabolism and cell cycle disruption in aggressive cancers like melanoma and ovarian cancer to understand the hallmarks of how metabolism and crosstalk can drive cancer progression and resistance.