Keynote
Precision Animal Models With Expanded Tropism For Human Specific Pathogens
J. Victor Garcia-Martinez, Professor of Medicine
J. Victor Garcia-Martinez received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Georgetown University. He received postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute, an institute within the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Garcia was a Research Associate at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He was an Assistant, and subsequently, an Associate Member of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and a Professor of Medicine at U. T. Southwestern in Dallas. Dr. Garcia is currently a Professor of Medicine in the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR), the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases (IGHID), and the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine all at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Throughout his career, Dr. Garcia has made seminal contributions to the understanding of HIV pathogenesis, specifically the function of Nef, which is an important determinant of HIV pathogenesis and disease progression. More recently, Dr. Garcia's group has established an outstanding track record in the development, implementation and use of humanized mice. Since their landmark publications describing the humanized BLT, TOM, MOM and LoM mouse models have been widely used to address key questions of HIV infection, transmission, prevention, persistence and cure and most recently to study the pathogenesis, treatment and prevention of SARS-CoV-2.
