Rate My Professor Rui Kong

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).