Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah School of Medicine
Project Title: The Evolutionary Landscape of HIV Broadly Neutralizing Antibody Development
Award Year: 2023
Biography
Dr. Tyler Starr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Utah School of Medicine where his lab studies molecular evolutionary arms races at the host:virus interface, with a particular focus on viral entry glycoproteins and their interactions with host entry receptors and antiviral antibodies. Tyler received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics in the lab of Dr. Joseph Thornton at the University of Chicago, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, where he investigated how the structure of sequence-function landscapes influences protein molecular evolution. He subsequently joined the lab of Dr. Jesse Bloom at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a postdoc, supported by the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and a NIAID K99 fellowship. During his postdoc, Tyler applied his training in molecular evolution toward the study of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV, conducting experiments that aided in the forecasting of viral evolution and the development of therapeutic antibody and vaccines against these zoonotic viruses. At the University of Utah, Tyler’s lab continues these research directions with the goals of understanding (1) how and why viruses evolve traits that facilitate their subsequent spillover and adaptation to humans, and (2) how antibodies evolve in vivo or can be engineered in vitro to broadly inhibit diverse families of potentially zoonotic viruses.