ERIC HUNTER

As a young scientist, Eric Hunter believed that the retroviruses known to cause cancer in animals eventually would be found in humans. “But I never thought we would be looking at a global epidemic,” says Hunter, a leading expert on the class of viruses that includes HIV.

In his laboratory at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Hunter studies how HIV enters cells. He also collaborates with Emory pathology professor Susan Allen to study HIV transmission among discordant HIV couples (one infected, one not) in Africa. Her seminal studies in Rwanda and Zambia have shown that voluntary counseling, testing, and condom use reduce transmission as much as 75%. The cohort also allows Hunter to study how the virus behaves when one partner infects another.

“There are few cohorts in the world that allow you to study HIV transmission and identify newly infected partners at the very earliest stage of their infection and know where the virus came from,” says Hunter. “The results of our work on these newly infected persons and their infecting virus gives us hope in understanding how HIV-1 initiates infection and how to direct vaccines against it.”

Hunter, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, co-directs the Emory Center for AIDS Research (CFAR). Last fall, he presided over the AIDS Vaccine 2010 Conference in Atlanta, hosted by the Emory CFAR and the Global Vaccine HIV Enterprise.