As we near the end of an eventful year, both globally and for Retrovirology, it is fitting to announce at this time new developments for the journal. We say goodbye and a deeply felt thank you to Robin Weiss as Reviews Editor and welcome in his place Frank Kirchhoff who will be known to many of you and was a recent winner of the Retrovirology annual prize. Frank brings with him a wealth of high quality research experience in HIV. He has already begun to assemble a new thematic review series for the journal to follow on from the two that have begun to be published this year on HIV Latency (edited by Ben Berkhout and Alexander Pasternak) and Disruptive technologies in retrovirus research (edited by Johnson Mak).
In another welcome addition to our team we are delighted to announce that David Margolis has joined as an Associate Editor. David is a leading expert in HIV latency and approaches to HIV cure which we all hope to be a topic that features strongly in Retrovirology in the coming few years. Read more about our two new Editors below.
On these optimistic notes we thank all our contributors and reviewers and look forward to an exciting 2018!
Prof. Dr. Frank Kirchhoff trained in Biology at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen and subsequently carried out his Diploma thesis at the German Primate Center in Göttingen. Thereafter, he performed post-doctoral training with Prof. Dr. Ronald Desrosiers at the NERPRC, Harvard Medical School, Boston. From 1994 to 2001, he was Lab Head of the Department of Virology at the University of Erlangen. In 2001, he joined the Institute of Virology at Ulm University Medical Center to become Associate Professor. Since 2009, he is Director of the newly funded Institute of Molecular Virology at Ulm University. His main interests are the pathogenesis of HIV/AIDS as well as innate immune defenses and mechanisms of viral evasion or counteraction by the viral accessory Vpu, Vpr and Nef proteins. Furthermore, the Kirchhoff group is interested in the discovery of novel endogenous factors affecting HIV and SIV infection and their optimization for basic research or clinical application.
Professor David Margolis became interested in HIV as the pandemic emerged during his medical training. Trained at Tufts, the New England Medical Center, the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the NIH, and Program in Molecular Medicine at UMass, he has cared for people with HIV and studied the interactions between HIV and the host cell on the molecular level for his entire career. For nearly 2 decades, he and many collaborators have begun to understand the molecular basis of HIV latency, develop drug and immunotherapy approaches to target persistent HIV, to develop the tools needed to cure HIV infection. He is the director of the UNC HIV Cure Center, funded in part by a public-private partnership between UNC and GlaxoSmithKline, principal investigator for the NIH-sponsored Collaboratory of AIDS Researchers for Eradication (http://www.delaneycare.org), and a professor of Medicine, and Microbiology & Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
19 December 2017
