Administrative Contact
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Alon Herschhorn Ph.D. is an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Prior to his current faculty appointment, Dr. Herschhorn held a faculty position as Instructor in Microbiology and Immunobiology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where he developed strong research program on virus entry and fate, with a specific focus on HIV-1. Dr. Herschhorn successfully obtained the prestigious Rothschild and amfAR fellowships as well as external funding, and developed productive collaborations with different research groups in USA and Canada.Dr. Herschhorn is leading a new research group in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Medicine that will develop new tools to study, at the molecular and cellular levels, the mechanisms underlying virus-host interactions. His previous work provided new insights into the entry process of HIV-1, the conformational dynamics of the HIV-1 envelope glycoproteins, and the cellular processes that contribute to the fate of viral infection.
My laboratory is working on exciting directions to understand and target HIV-1 host interactions at the molecular and cellular levels. We use interdisciplinary approaches at the interface of synthetic and molecular virology, immunology and cell biology to gain new insights into complex biological processes with the aim of translating these insights into novel therapies and vaccines to treat and prevent viral infections.
HIV-1 infection and latency; HIV-1 vaccine and eradication