Rate My Professor Rui Kong

Rui Kong, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Emory Vaccine Center and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. He concurrently serves as an Investigator at the Emory National Primate Research Center and as a Distinguished Investigator for the Georgia Research Alliance. Kong earned his PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2011 and his BS from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2006. Prior to his appointment at Emory in March 2020, he held progressive roles at the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, including Staff Scientist from July 2019 to February 2020, Research Fellow from December 2016 to July 2019, and Postdoctoral Fellow from August 2012 to December 2016. He also served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania from January to July 2012.

Kong's laboratory research focuses on antibodies and vaccines against HIV-1 and other pathogens. The work addresses two primary questions: how to consistently induce specific highly functional antibodies by vaccination and how to maintain antibody responses above protective levels for extended periods. Specific areas of interest include novel vaccine design strategies to elicit broadly-reactive anti-HIV-1 neutralizing antibodies, HIV-1 Envelope fusion peptide-directed antibodies elicited in infected and immunized subjects, and mechanisms governing antibody elicitation, maturation, and duration in immunized individuals. Kong has contributed key publications to the field, including "Developmental pathway for potent V1V2-directed HIV-neutralizing antibodies" in Nature (2014), "Trimeric HIV-1-Env Structures Define Glycan Shields from Clades A, B, and G" in Cell (2016), "Fusion peptide of HIV-1 as a site of vulnerability to neutralizing antibody" in Science (2016), "Maturation Pathway from Germline to Broad HIV-1 Neutralizer of a CD4-Mimic Antibody" in Cell (2016), "Structural repertoire of HIV-1-neutralizing antibodies targeting the CD4 supersite in 14 donors" in Cell (2015), and "Epitope-based vaccine design yields fusion peptide-directed antibodies that neutralize diverse strains of HIV-1" in Nature Medicine (2018).