Priti Kumar, PhD

Dr. Priti Kumar received her PhD in Immunology from Indian Institute of Science in the year 2002. After completing her postdoctoral studies from Harvard Medical School, she joined as an Assistant Professor at Yale University in the year 2008. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases at Yale University School of Medicine. Her laboratory conducts translational research with a focus on treatment of diseases caused by RNA viruses. For the last 12 years as faculty at Yale, she made key contributions towards the development and testing of gene therapy and cure based approaches that overcome in vivo biological barriers to enable the use of next-generation biologicals like nucleic acids such as siRNA, nucleases such as recombinases and CRISPRs and antibodies with effector function for their therapeutic potential against viruses like HIV-1, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, dengue and now, SARS-COV2. Her laboratory is well-recognized for studies on HIV-1 in state-of-the-art humanized mouse models that allow characterization of virus pathogenesis in the context of a human immune system. Her laboratory also conducts pioneering research on live-imaging pathogenesis of infectious viruses in small animal models.