TELL US MORE LISA GRALINSKI ’02:
Cracking the Secrets of Human Coronaviruses Growing up in rural western Massachusetts, Lisa
Gralinski was in high school when she first encountered what a career as a biomedical researcher might look like. She attended a summer research experience running microbiology experiments at Smith College and read the real-life thriller about an Ebola outbreak, The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. These peeks into life as a virus-hunter set Gralinski on a path that would take her through Haverford’s outstanding biology program, including the celebrated “Superlab” class, to become one of the leading U.S. scientists working with human coronaviruses. Having investigated closely related coronaviruses during the past 12 years, Gralinski was uniquely poised to tackle scientific questions swirling around the new coronavirus that
emerged as the culprit in the global COVID-19 pandemic. Now an assistant professor, Gralinski’s laboratory group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has been working nearly around the clock to chip away at the mysteries of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the respiratory infection COVID-19. Suited up in protective suits and respirators in a Biosafety Level 3 laboratory, Gralinski and her colleagues have probed how a patient’s immune cells react to the virus and how an individual’s genetic variation may change those interactions, altering the course of their illness for better or worse. Their work could lead to improved treatments for COVID-19 and a better understanding of the virus’s stealthy path to infection—and ways to block it.
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