On Monday May 22 at 12:30h in the auditorium of the head building of the Parc Científic will be held the annual conference in memory of Mario Fares. This is a joint initiative of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio and the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology that gives voice to distinguished young researchers in evolutionary biology. This year's lecture will be given by Aida Andrés (University College London) and is entitled "Host immunity adaptation to SIV across chimpanzee populations".
In chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, the central and eastern subspecies are naturally infected in the wild with simian immunodeficiency lentivirus (SIV). Although SIV infection reduces fitness, it is not usually associated with the immunodeficiency that characterizes AIDS in humans - caused by zoonotic transmission of SIV in chimpanzees that gave rise to HIV and one of the deadliest pandemics in history. Aida Andrés' research confirms the importance of SIV as a selective force, sheds light on host strategies to reduce SIV pathogenicity, and demonstrates the potential of population genomics to understand these processes.
Aida Andrés is an Associate Professor at University College London (UCL). Aida obtained her PhD working on comparative primate genomics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra under the supervision of Jaume Bertranpetit. She then completed two postdocs in human population genomics, first at Cornell University in Andrew G. Clark's group and then at the National Human Genome Research Institute (MD, USA) with Eric Green. He moved to Leipzig to start a new group on population genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, before joining the UCL Institute of Genetics in 2017.
The annual Mario Ali Fares Memorial Lecture is a joint initiative of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio (a joint center of the Universitat de València and CSIC) and the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology. Mario Ali Fares was a researcher at CSIC and Trinity College Dublin, a founding member of I2SysBio.
