MHRP
Dr. Eric Lewitus is a Research Scientist in the Military HIV Research Program’s Viral Genomics Section, led by Dr. Morgane Rolland. He uses phylogenetic, bioinformatic, and data-modeling approaches to investigate mechanisms of immune evasion and molecular targets for vaccine design in the context of HIV-1 and coronavirus natural infection. He has developed computational tools to design optimized HIV-1 subtype consensus sequences for use as assay reagents, to generate multiple founder variant-type acute infection sequences for use as HIV-1 vaccine immunogens, and to map the immunogenetic space of a pan-coronavirus vaccine. Dr. Lewitus received his PhD from University College London and was a Max Planck Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, where he studied neocortical development in mammals. After postdoctoral research in microbial phylogenetics at the École Normale Superieure in Paris, he joined WRAIR in 2018 to work on infectious disease prevention research.