Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D. is a Professor of Immunology and Microbial Science at The Scripps Research Institute. Her research explains how and why viruses are pathogenic and provides the roadmap for medical defense. Her team has explained how the viruses drive themselves into cells, how they suppress immune function, where human antibodies can defeat them, as well as the structure of the entire human antibody itself. A recent discovery expanded the central dogma of molecular biology by proving that certain viral proteins actually rearrange into different structures at different times for different functions.
Her work has been recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, an Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease and a Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, by young investigator awards from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the American Society of Microbiology, and by the Surhain Sidhu award for the most outstanding contribution to the field of diffraction by a person within five years of the Ph.D. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, serves on the Scientific Leadership Board of the Global Virus Network and is the Director of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Immunotherapeutic Consortium. This organization, the VIC, united the field into a single force to understand and provide antibody therapeutics against Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and other viruses.
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