Nihal Altan-Bonnet, Ph.D.

Dr. Nihal Altan-Bonnet heads the Laboratory of Host-Pathogen Dynamics at the National Institutes of Health in the USA. Her lab is comprised of a multidisciplinary team of cell biologists, virologists, environmental engineers, and computational biologists who apply their talents to understand how viruses transmit themselves effectively among hosts and establish successful infections. Dr. Altan-Bonnet and her team have made groundbreaking discoveries that include:

• Discovering that PI4P lipids panvirally critical for infection by RNA viruses (Hsu et al., Cell 2010)
• Discovering a novel highly virulent viral infectious unit where viruses are transmitted en bloc inside extracellular vesicles (Chen et al., Cell 2015; Santiana et al., Cell Host and Microbe 2018).
• Discovering SARS-CoV2 and other coronaviruses use the unusual lysosomal exocytotic pathway to exit cells, disrupt antigen presentation and evade immune defenses (Ghosh et al., Cell 2020).
• Discovering that enteric viruses such as norovirus, rotavirus and astrovirus also replicate in salivary glands and transmit through saliva (Ghosh et al., Nature 2022)

Dr. Nihal Altan-Bonnet received her Ph.D. in cellular biophysics from The Rockefeller University. After conducting postdoctoral research with Dr. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at the NIH, she joined the faculty of Rutgers University. In 2013, Dr. Altan-Bonnet returned to the NIH as an Earl Stadtman Investigator, becoming head of the Laboratory of Host-Pathogen Dynamics at the NHLBI and was promoted to tenured Senior Investigator in 2017.

Dr. Altan-Bonnet has been recognized several times for her outstanding research, including receiving the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) (2012), being named a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (2013), a Scialog Fellow of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (2015-2017) and being elected to the American Academy of Microbiology (2022) and the Henry Kunkel Society (2023).