Rafick Sekaly, PhD

Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sekaly is a the Co-Director of the Bioinformatics and Integrated Systems Biology (BISB) Core of the TRAC. He is a Professor of Medicine and Vice-Chair of Translational Medicine in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and the Emory University School of Medicine. His research group has been continuously funded since 1988 by federal and nonfederal grants. He is the principal investigator on numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. His research program focuses on using systems biology approaches to better understand the immunopathogenesis of infectious diseases including tuberculosis and HIV. His group has pioneered the use of transcriptomics and bioinformatics to identify predictors/correlates of immune responses that lead to protection from viral infections, including HIV, SIV and flaviviruses, protection from disease progression and successful immune interventions including adjuvants, licensed preventative and therapeutic vacccines. His research has also generated pioneering findings that highlight the impact of HIV infection on thymic output, T cell memory, mechanisms of of CD4 and CD8 T cell dysfunction, and on innate immunity and mechanisms of HIV persistence.