Carol Carter, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stony Brook University Renaissance School of Medicine, USA. She obtained her PhD at Yale University under the mentorship of Drs. Francis Black and Ann Schluederberg studying measles virus replication and pursued postdoctoral studies on reovirus in the laboratory of Dr. Aaron Shatkin at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology. She established her independent career at Stony Brook University in 1975 and entered the world of HIV/AIDS research in the 1980’s where she has contributed to understanding of retroviral protease activation, capsid structure and assembly and engagement of Tsg101 and ESCRT machinery, in hopes of translating bench observations to antiviral drug development.
Sebla B. Kutluay, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine, USA. She was born and raised in Turkey. After completing her undergraduate studies in Turkey, she obtained her PhD at Michigan State University under Dr. Steven J. Trizenberg’s mentorship studying chromatin regulation of herpes simplex virus genomic DNA during lytic and latent infections. Dr. Kutluay conducted her postdoctoral studies in the lab of Dr. Paul Bieniasz at Rockefeller University, where she made seminal discoveries in HIV-1 particle assembly, maturation, selective genome packaging and virus-host interactions. She established her independent group in 2015 and continues to study how several viral and host RNA-binding proteins regulate HIV-1, and more recently SARS-CoV-2 replication.