Beyond grateful and excited to be invited to speak in one of the JSV meeting symposiums in Japan later this month! Thank you to @shigeru0701.bsky.social and other meeting organizers. 😁🙏

New preprint! If some merbecoviruses use DPP4 and others use ACE2, what do those hedgehog merbecoviruses use?! As it turns out, neither! In our latest study, we uncover the "missing" receptor for the MERS-related viruses in hedgehogs. [These findings were first shared at ASV this year] (1/6)

Beaming with pride that Jordan Polster, a student in my lab at Yale, was selected for the #Gilliam #Fellowship from @hhmi.org I look forward to mentoring Jordan and participating in the various mentorship workshops. Jordan - congrats! And I can’t wait to see your research advance!

Vaccination schedules on the CDC website have already started changing under RFK Jr. So we published a guide to the evidence-based vaccine recommendations in place *before* all 17 members of the advisory panel were abruptly dismissed by the new admin. www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-... 🧪

Sooo happy to finally have this one published!! (3 years in the making… 👀) A comprehensive investigation into the recency and geographical origins of both SARS-CoVs that spilled to humans in the past few decades, now in @cp-cell.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

How could you not be impressed by a bird in your yard? This dude can fly anywhere and it came here to hang out with you

...a “pointless, ill-advised move that will hurt U.S. science and pandemic readiness,” says Charles Rice, a Nobel Prize–winning virologist at Rockefeller University www.science.org/content/arti...

Human naïve B cells recognize prepandemic influenza virus hemagglutinins www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The rising threat of deadly diseases jumping from animals to humans www.ft.com/content/a714...

Five years ago (Sunday 5 Jan 2020), scientists in Zhang YongZhen's group in Shanghai obtained their first sequence of the new virus, from samples obtained outside of the official national protocol. They submitted it to GenBank with an embargo. ▫️1/ www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN90...

Really cool work that shows how different spikes from 27 SARS-2 variants behave in the same ancestral backbone. It also really nicely illustrates how other mutations in the CoV backbone might affect replication and other viral properties! 👇

Our article is now out in Nature Biotechnology. Here we outline challenges for developing broad-based mucosal vaccines for respiratory viruses. Check it out! Congrats to Junghwa and Jordan from my lab and to other co-authors! www.nature.com/articles/s41...