Lecture Title: Innate immune control of emerging RNA viruses
Sara Cherry is the John W. Eckman Professor of Medical Science in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Scientific Director of the University of Pennsylvania High-Throughput Screening Core, the Director of the Program for Chemogenomic Discovery, and is leading the RNA Therapeutics Group at the Institute for RNA Innovation. Her research focuses on the interface between viruses and hosts. She has pioneered the use of high-throughput cell-based screening to study a viral infections, focusing in emerging and re-emerging RNA viruses. Her lab has discovered host proteins that promote infection and innate immune mechanisms by which cells sense and respond to infection. Her studies on emerging arthropod-borne viruses have uncovered evolutionarily conserved host factors that impact infection in the vector and human hosts. And her more recent studies on emerging respiratory viruses has uncovered new facets of interferon signaling and innate control of SARS-CoV-2 infection of the respiratory tract.
