Santa Fe Institute

Bio

Bette Korber is a Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She obtained a Ph.D. in Immunology from Caltech in 1988, and was a Leukemia Society postdoctoral fellow in retrovirology at Harvard before joining the Theoretical Biology group at Los Alamos in 1990. At that point she turned from the lab bench to theory and analyses. She has led an HIV sequence and immunology database project at Los Alamos for the past decade. In part using the collected data in the HIV database as a foundation for her work, and in part working with experimentalist collaborators from around globe, she has co-authored over 190 scientific papers. Most of these studies focus on HIV, but occasionally involve work on other pathogens, the mammalian immune response, and human genetics. Her primary areas of research include: HIV vaccine design; HIV evolution; and the impact of the human immune response on HIV, and conversely the potential for a pathogen to impact human populations. Scientifically she most enjoys working in interdisciplinary collaborations to understand and interpret complex experimental data. She received the E.O. Lawrence Award, the highest scientific honor from the Department of Energy, for her achievements in the Life Sciences, and was Elizabeth Glaser Scientist. When she’s not working on her science, she enjoys losing arguments to her teenage sons and playing whistle and drum in a local Celtic band.