Sumit K. Chanda is a leading infectious disease researcher who studies how the immune system responds to pathogen challenges and how pathogens evade immune surveillance, with an eye toward prevention and treatment. He helped discover elaborate strategies employed by the innate immune system to detect HIV-1 infection. He earned his doctorate in molecular pharmacology from Stanford University in 2001 and received his post-doctoral training at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF). He subsequently transitioned to a Group Leader position and established his research group in the Division of Cellular Genomics at GNF. In 2007, he joined the Infectious and Inflammatory Disease Center at the Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 2013. In 2015, he was appointed Director of the Immunity and Pathogenesis Program at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. In November 2021, he joined the Scripps Research Department of Immunology and Microbiology and its nonprofit drug discovery and development division, Calibr, focusing on preparedness for future pandemics.
Lars Pache is a Research Assistant Professor at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. He performed his doctoral work at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California, and obtained a Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He joined the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute as a Postdoctoral Associate in 2008. His research focuses on infectious diseases and immune responses, host–pathogen interactions, and inflammation, with the goal of using systems-level approaches to discover and develop novel drug treatments for viral infections, including HIV/AIDS, Influenza A, and SARS-CoV-2. He is also interested in developing strategies for the management of large datasets and has contributed to the development of popular web-based bioinformatics tools.
