Beatrice H. Hahn, M.D.

My laboratory has a long-standing interest in elucidating the origins and evolution of human and simian immunodeficiency viruses and in studying HIV/SIV gene function and disease mechanisms from an evolutionary perspective. My group was the first to describe the extensive in vivo genetic variability of HIV-1 (Hahn et al., Science, 1986) and to discover that recombination between highly divergent viruses represents a major driving force of HIV/SIV diversification (Robertson et al., Nature, 1995). We also developed methods for the non-invasive detection of SIV in wild-living apes, which led to the identification of the chimpanzee and gorilla reservoirs of pandemic and non-pandemic HIV-1 (Gao et al., Nature, 1999; Keele et al., Science, 2006; d’Arc et al., PNAS, 2015). This work has recently come full circle with the discovery that a highly divergent SIVcpz Env may be suitable to immunofocus HIV-1 bNab responses to the Env trimer apex (Barbian et al., mBio, 2015; Andrabi et al., Cell Rep, 2019).