Dr. Andrea Gamarnik is a molecular virologist. She earned her PhD degree in Biochemistry, in the University of Buenos Aires. After a postdoctoral training at UCSF, she returned to Argentina in 2002 where she stablished the first laboratory of Molecular Virology at the Institute Leloir, Buenos Aires. Since then, her laboratory became a reference in dengue virus basic biology and made seminal contributions for understanding flavivirus RNA replication. She is currently a Principal Investigator of the National Research Council (CONICET) and the Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires-CONICET at the Institute Leloir. Her work focuses on understanding the function of viral RNA structures and defining how thee structures modulate viral processes. In this regard, her group identify the promoter for dengue virus RNA replication and uncovered the mechanism of viral RNA synthesis, which was then extrapolated to an extensive group of viruses. In addition, her studies on functional viral RNA structures provided a framework to analyze viral RNA genomes as dynamic molecules. More recently, she became interested in studying adaptation of viral RNAs in mosquito and humans, and proposed new models of viral RNA specialization in different hosts. The achievements of Dr. Gamarnik in virology have been widely recognized internationally. She was HHMI International Research Scholar in the Infectious Disease Program (2005-2011), became a member of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2014 and was recipient of numerous awards such as the L’Oreal-UNESCO 2016 “For Women in Science” in representation of Latin America.
