Ulrike Lange

University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Heinrich Pette Institute, Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology

Ulrike Lange is a clinician in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and an independent postdoctoral researcher at the Heinrich Pette Institute, Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology in Hamburg (Germany). After her PhD in the laboratory of Azim Surani at the University of Cambridge (UK), she completed her medical degree at the University of Freiburg (Germany). She has since followed a dual clinical and research career, qualifying as specialized anesthesiologist as well as developing a profile as independent researcher. Her research focuses on molecular phenomena in chronic HIV-1 infection, combining her expertise in chromatin biology and genome regulation with the field of molecular virology. One of the major objectives of her young research group is to understand the crosstalk between HIV-1-derived DNA and the human genome of infected target cells. Ultimately, she would like to improve our understanding of the pathomechanisms in chronic HIV infection and thereby contribute to the development of new strategies towards achieving remission in chronically HIV-infected patients.

Roxane Verdikt

University of California, Los Angeles

Roxane Verdikt is a Belgian molecular biologist who earned her PhD in 2019 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in the service of molecular virology led by Pr. Carine Van Lint. Her thesis focused on the epigenetic and transcriptional regulation of Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1 (HIV-1). Notably, she studied how DNA methylation accumulates on the HIV-1 promoter during latent infections. She also investigated enhancer-mediated control of gene expression by studying how HIV-1 genes are specifically expressed in macrophages. At the beginning of 2020, Roxane joined the laboratory of Pr. Patrick Allard at the University of California, Los Angeles to study epigenetic regulation in germ cell specification. Her main scientific interests reside in the regulation of gene expression in the context of host-pathogen interplay as well as in the context of adaptation to environmental cues.

Martin V. Hamann

Heinrich Pette Institute for Experimental Virology

Martin V. Hamann is a biochemist by education and obtained his PhD in Molecular Retrovirology at the Dresden University of Technology, Germany, in 2015. He developed vector systems for the transient delivery of mRNA molecules by retroviral particles with potential therapeutic application. Following his thesis, he joined several other laboratories to widen his scientific view but never lost his contact to viruses and his research focus of host-pathogen interactions. Since 2019, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow in laboratory of Professor Joachim Hauber at the Heinrich Pette Institute for Experimental Virology in Germany. His projects aim is to understand HIV-1 latency on an epigenetic scale as well as HIV-1 crosstalk with human endogenous retroviruses.