Professor Robert F. Siliciano is a professor of Medicine and Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  In 1995, his laboratory provided the first demonstration that latently infected memory CD4+ T cells were present in patients with HIV-1 infection.  He showed that latently infected cells persist even in patients on prolonged antiretroviral therapy (ART).  These studies indicated that eradication of HIV-1 infection with ART alone would never be possible, a finding which led to a fundamental change in the treatment strategy for HIV-1 infection.  This latent reservoir is now recognized as the major barrier to curing HIV-1 infection and is the subject of an intense international research effort.  Professor Siliciano’s laboratory has gone on to characterize the reservoir and to explore strategies for eradicating it.  In addition, Professor Siliciano has developed a theoretical foundation for understanding the success of ART in controlling HIV-1 replication.

 

Professor Siliciano graduated from Princeton and received his MD and PhD degrees from Johns Hopkins.  After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he joined the Hopkins faculty.  He has received the Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and two NIH Merit Awards.  He is a past Chairman of the NIH AIDS and Related Research Study Section.  For 16 years, he directed the Hopkins MD-PhD Program, and he now serves as an advisor for MDPhD students.  In 2008, he received a major award in AIDS research, the Bernard N. Fields Memorial Lecture at the Conference for Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.