Dr. Matthias Götte studied Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) and obtained his PhD degree in 1997 at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried. Following his postdoctoral training at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research in Montreal (Quebec) under the supervision of Dr. Mark Wainberg, he joined the faculty at McGill University in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology in 2000. In 2011, Dr. Götte was promoted to the rank of Professor, and, in 2013, he received the Chercheur National award of the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec. In 2014, he accepted the position as Chair of the Medical Microbiology & Immunology Department at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Research in his laboratory is focused on the study of viral replication, its inhibition and the problem of drug resistance. His interests evolved from studies on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the hepatitis C virus (HCV) to RNA viruses with a high epidemic potential, including influenza, Ebola, and SARS. Results from his laboratory have contributed to the development of novel classes of viral polymerase inhibitors. Dr. Götte has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and edited several books in the field of biochemical virology. His research program is funded through grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Ministry of Development and Trade in Alberta, and the pharmaceutical industry.
Team Category: Project Team
READDI co-founder and scientific adviser Mark Heise is a professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s genetics department. His research program is focused on understanding how viral and host genetic factors interact to influence virus-induced disease.
Mark is currently studying alphaviruses — mosquito-borne RNA viruses that cause encephalitis and infectious arthritis in humans — as well the respiratory viruses influenza A and SARS-CoV-2. He uses a combination of molecular virology, viral immunology and systems genetics approaches in his research. Among other things, he seeks to define the mechanisms by which certain determinants promote virus-induced disease and to understand how host genetic variation affects the ways individuals respond to infection or vaccination.
Mark’s lab is also part of a large interdisciplinary antiviral drug development program at UNC. In addition to gaining new insights into the way viruses induce disease, the program’s goal is to leverage this research to develop new therapies for the prevention or treatment of human disease. These include broad-spectrum antivirals aimed at SARS-CoV-2 and also emerging alphaviruses, for which there are no approved therapeutic antivirals.
Mark earned a Doctor of Philosophy in immunology from Washington University in St. Louis and a Bachelor of Arts in biology from St. Olaf College.
READDI co-founder and scientific adviser Nat Moorman is an associate professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s microbiology and immunology department. His research includes studying how viruses hijack cellular machinery to facilitate their replication.
Nat uses a combination of new technologies and traditional molecular virology techniques to investigate host-pathogen interactions, especially the ways viruses alter cell signaling pathways to drive viral protein synthesis. In addition, he is leading multiple efforts to discover and develop novel direct-acting and host-targeted antiviral drugs for viruses of pandemic concern.
Nat was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton for six years. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biology and microbial pathogenesis from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a Bachelor of Science in microbiology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
READDI co-founder and scientific adviser Ralph Baric is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s epidemiology department and professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s microbiology and immunology department. He is one of the world’s foremost authorities in the study of coronaviruses, noroviruses and dengue viruses, and is responsible for UNC-Chapel Hill’s leading role in coronavirus research.
For the past three decades, Ralph has warned that the emerging coronaviruses represent a significant and ongoing global health threat, particularly because they can jump, without warning, from animals into the human population, and they tend to spread rapidly. Ralph has led the world in recognizing the importance of zoonotic viruses, with detailed studies of the molecular, genetic and evolutionary mechanisms that regulate the establishment and dissemination of these viruses within newly adopted hosts. Specifically, he works to decipher the complex interactions between a virus and cell surface molecules that enable entry and cross-species transmission of RNA viruses.
A member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ralph earned a Doctor of Philosophy in microbiology and a Bachelor of Science in zoology from North Carolina State University.
Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, DVM, PhD, is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and serves as the director of the Influenza Research Institute. As part of the READDI-AC program, he is the principal investigator of project 3, which aims to identify and further characterize small molecule compounds exhibiting antiviral activity against Ebola and Marburg viruses.
Dr. Peter Halfmann, PhD, is a research associate professor at the University of Wisconsin– Madison who oversees the screening and characterization of antiviral compounds against filoviruses (Ebola and Marburg viruses) utilizing a range of cell-based assays that he developed. Additionally, he is a visiting scientist at NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory where he has biosafety level-4 access for research with authentic filoviruses.
Alexander Tropsha, PhD. is K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy (ranked #1 in the country by US News & World Report), UNC-Chapel Hill. Prof. Tropsha obtained his PhD in Chemical Enzymology in 1986 from Moscow State University, Russia, and came to UNC-Chapel Hill in 1989 as a postdoctoral fellow. He joined the School of Pharmacy in 1991 as an Assistant Professor and became full professor in 2002. His research interests are in the areas of Computer-Assisted Drug Design, Cheminformatics, Computational Toxicology, Materials Informatics, Structural Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Knowledge Graph Mining. He has authored or co-authored more than 290 peer-reviewed research papers, reviews, and book chapters and co-edited two monographs. He has trained more than 30 graduate students and over 30 postdoctoral fellows. He has served as a member of the Editorial Board and Associate Editor of the ACS Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. His research has been supported by multiple grants from the NIH, NSF, EPA, DOD, research foundations, and private companies. He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and a consultant to several technology and drug discovery companies. He is a co-founder of Predictive, LLC, a UNC startup specializing in building models and tools for chemical toxicity prediction.
Jamie J. Arnold is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology and Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Ithaca College in 1994. He earned a Master of Science in chemistry from The Pennsylvania State University in 1997 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from The Pennsylvania State University in 2003. Following his doctoral studies, Arnold became a fixed term faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State in 2003. Arnold moved to his current position in Chapel Hill in the fall of 2019. The primary goal of the Arnold laboratory has been development of strategies to treat or to prevent infections by RNA viruses. We have used biological, biochemical, and biophysical techniques to study the mechanism and regulation of the genome-replication process for these viruses.
Craig E. Cameron is the Jeffery Houpt Distinguished Investigator, Professor, and Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Howard University in 1987. Following doctoral studies in biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and post-doctoral studies in the chemistry department at Penn State, Cameron joined the faculty of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State in 1997. He was tenured, promoted to the rank of associate professor and appointed Louis Martarano Associate Professor in 2002. In 2005, he was promoted to the rank of professor and named the Paul Berg Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. From 2011-2012, Cameron served a two-year term as Associate Head for Research and Graduate Education. In 2013, he was named holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Cameron moved to his current position in Chapel Hill in the fall of 2019. Cameron’s research focuses on the enzymology and cell biology of genome replication in positive-strand RNA viruses. The goal of this work is development of novel strategies to treat and/or prevent viral infections. During his career, Dr. Cameron has received several honors, including the Howard Temin Award from the National Cancer Institute, an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, a Distinguished Service Award from the Eberly College of Science Alumni Association, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and Fellow of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Cameron is a former president of the American Society for Virology and currently serves as an associate editor for Journal of Biological Chemistry and a deputy editor for Science Advances.
We are recognized as a leading research group in the intersection of organic photochemistry and microscopy imaging. Our research centers on designing, synthesizing and using fluorescent molecular probes and on developing fluorescence microscopy methods that combined provide unprecedented detail of chemical and biologically relevant processes with unsurpassed spatial-temporal resolution and sensitivity. The hallmark of our program lies in visualizing and monitoring the motions of molecules one at a time, by tracing fluorescence emission at the single-molecule level, unraveling properties otherwise hidden in bulk ensembles. We create unique “movies” – sequences of molecular recognition and assembly processes as they lead to increasingly complex nano- and meso-scale structures. Our work has shed light on the mechanical workings of single macromolecules, notably of key proteins in DNA and RNA viral genome replication of HCV, HIV and currently ongoing SARS-CoV-2. His work has also provided key insights on the structure and dynamics of DNA-based nanostructures. It also enabled us to map and track in real-time reactive oxygen species (ROS) in living cells, providing key insights into these elusive cellular species, associated with homeostasis, disease and aging.
Gonzalo Cosa received his Licentiate in Chemistry from Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto, Argentina, in 1996. He went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry (Photochemistry) at the University of Ottawa (2002) and was next a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin involved in single molecule fluorescence biophysical studies on HIV-1 nucleocapsid protein. In 2005, he joined the Department of Chemistry at McGill University as Assistant Professor, becoming Associate Professor in 2011 and being promoted in 2016 to Professor. His research centers on designing, synthesizing, and using fluorescent molecular probes, and on developing fluorescence microscopy methods, that when combined provide unprecedented detail of chemical and biologically-relevant processes with unsurpassed spatial-temporal resolution and sensitivity. His work has shed light on the mechanical workings of single macromolecules, notably on the interaction with DNA or RNA of key proteins involved in viral genome replication. His work has also provided key insights on the structure and dynamics of DNA-based nanostructures. His work also enabled mapping, in real time, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and electrophilic stress in living cells, providing key insights into these elusive cellular species, associated with homeostasis, disease and aging.