Ronald C. Desrosiers PhD

Ronald C. Desrosiers, PhD, served as director of a research institute at Harvard Medical School for 12 years prior to his arrival at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in 2013. Dr. Desrosiers serves as Director of Research Faculty Development and Professor in the Department of Pathology here at the Miller School of Medicine.

Dr. Desrosiers was the leader of the team that discovered the simian immunodeficiency virus in 1984 and was senior author of its publication in Science in 1985. Since that time, he has made numerous seminal contributions using the SIV/macaque model to better understand the mechanisms by which HIV-1 and SIV cause disease and for vaccine development efforts.

In 1990, he described the first-ever infectious, pathogenic molecular clone of this group of viruses and to this day it remains the clone of choice for controlled experiments in monkeys. Its 10,279 base-pair sequence can be manipulated in any way such that the effects on viral tropism, replicative capacity, immune avoidance, and disease propensity can be examined. Dr. Desrosiers has used this system to better understand the relative importance and functional contribution of the so-called nonessential genes and to better understand the evolution of antigenic escape variants.