Affiliation: Stanford University

Dr. Amanda M. Dudek is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. She holds a B.S. in Microbiology from Colorado State University and a PhD in Virology from Harvard University. Her early work included the use of adenoviral vectors to study neuronal AMPA receptor and chaperone protein biology, leading to an interest in viral vectors. Her primary dissertation work studied mechanisms of Adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector cell entry pathways used by diverse AAV capsids, including identification of a subset of capsids which use a non-canonical entry pathway independent of the AAV receptor AAVR. She additionally identified the second known highly conserved protein required for cellular entry both in vitro and in vivo, GPR108, by CRISPR screen. Her current work focuses on using AAV as a DNA donor for homology directed repair in primary human hematopoietic cells for development of gene editing-based therapies against viral infections, as well as characterization of cellular responses following AAV vector transduction.