Congratulations to Dr. Ron Swanstrom, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics for his selection as a 2014 American Academy of Microbiology Fellow.
The American Academy of Microbiology, the honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, just announced that Dr. Ron Swanstrom , distinguished professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics and joint professor of Microbiology & Immunology has been selected as one of the 2014 Fellows. Selection for fellowship is a highly competitive annual peer review process, based on scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced the field of microbiology. Over the last 50 years, 2,700 distinguished scientists have been elected to the Academy. Fellows are elected through a highly selective, annual, peer review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology. Each elected Fellow has built an exemplary career in basic and applied research, teaching, clinical and public health, industry or government service.
A major research effort in the Swanstrom lab is directed at understanding the role of the protease and proteolytic processing in the HIV virus life cycle, and assessing the nature of drug resistance to protease inhibitors. They are especially interested in defining the extent to which drug resistance mutations compromise the fitness of the drug-resistant virus. A second area of research has to do with the role of the HIV-1 Env protein in pathogenesis and its use in vaccine development. Learn more at: http://swanstrom.web.unc.edu/.