Southern Africa is the region with the world’s highest rate of new HIV infections. Over the last decade, there has been a multi-million-dollar investment in antiretroviral therapy to prevent the onward transmission of HIV and bring the epidemic under control.

Deadly coronaviruses have emerged recently and no vaccines or therapeutics are available to combat them. To understand how these viruses attach to and enter our cells, we determined the structure of the molecule initiating infection in complex with various sialic acid derivatives.

Winter 2014, I was revising a grant proposal to develop methods for characterizing bacterial methylomes, the collective DNA methylation events beyond the four canonical bases, G, A, T and C.