Affiliation: The Francis Crick Institute

Dr. Chloe Tsai is a Postdoctoral Training Fellow in the Retroviral Replication Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. Her research interests focus on HIV-1 immunopathogenesis and viral restriction factor SAMHD1. Her early work at Imperial College London assessed the prevention of HIV-1-induced immune activation of plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) by using chloroquine-derivatives. While pursuing her PhD at the University of Oxford, she investigated virus controllers with low immune activation and their landscape of CD8+ T cell epitopes across HIV-1 subtype B, C, and CRF07_BC from South African, Indian, and Taiwanese cohorts. Following her passion for HIV-1 immunology and host-virus interaction, Dr Tsai’s post-doctoral research explores the role of viral restriction factor SAMHD1 in activated monocytes and T cells, as well as the impact of viral accessory protein Vpr on the early spread of immune cells populations.