We are delighted to invite you to the next talk within the Berlin Seminar Series in Immunology – a joint initiative of the Berlin immunology community aimed at fostering stronger interactions across the city's many immune-focused institutions and laboratories.

On June 16, we are pleased to welcome Melanie Ott from the Gladstone Institutes as our guest speaker at the Zuse Institut Berlin.

Melanie Ott is Director of the Gladstone Infectious Disease Institute, Senior Vice President at the Gladstone Institutes, and Professor of Medicine at UC San Francisco, where she holds the Nick and Sue Hellmann Distinguished Professorship. A native of Germany, she earned her medical degree from the University of Frankfurt/Main and her PhD from the Elmezzi
Graduate School of Molecular Medicine at Northwell Health. After leading her own laboratory at the German Cancer Research Center – where she worked closely with virologist and Nobel laureate Harald zur Hausen – she joined Gladstone Institutes in 2002, where she has built one of the leading virus–host interaction programs in the world.

Ott's research is guided by a single ambition: to study the viruses of today in order to prepare for the viruses of tomorrow. Her laboratory has made foundational contributions to understanding how viruses such as HIV, hepatitis C, Zika, and SARS-CoV-2 hijack human cell biology, with a particular focus on chromatin regulation, lipid droplet biology, and
host–virus protein interactions. Among her lab's many contributions, she demonstrated the critical role of non-histone protein acetylation in HIV transcription and latency, identified the hepatitis C virus's dependence on lipid droplets in liver cells, and pioneered CRISPR/Cas13-based diagnostic platforms for rapid RNA virus detection deployable on a mobile phone. She also directs the HOPE Collaboratory, an NIH-funded consortium dedicated to the permanent eradication of HIV.