Molly Ohainle is an affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Global Health and an assistant professor of immunology and molecular medicine at UC Berkeley. Her lab studies how cells are protected from infection by viral pathogens. Viruses and the hosts they infect are locked in an evolutionary arms race in which an array of directly-acting intracellular host defenses are antagonized and evaded by viral pathogens. They use functional genomics approaches and molecular virology to understand how key molecular interactions mediate the outcomes of virus infection inside a cell. They primarily study this in the context of HIV and related primate lentiviruses, an animal-to-human viral species transmission with major impacts on human health. They hope to uncover and understand the mechanisms through which viruses and their hosts fight these battles across evolutionary time.

Current projects include research on:

• Discovery of key cellular restrictions to HIV infection
• HIV capsid as a target of cellular antiviral defense
• Viral functional genomics