Welkin was born in the fall of 1967, in a small town somewhere on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He grew up in a variety of places, including Detroit, Seattle, Chicago, Havre (Montana) and Monterey (California). He is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley (B.A. in Microbiology), and worked for a year at U.C. San Francisco as a research assistant in Jennifer Lavail’s laboratory. Welkin completed his graduate work in John Coffin’s lab at Tufts University (Ph.D. in Microbiology & Molecular Biology) and his postdoctoral training with Ron Desrosiers at Harvard Medical School. He is also an alumnus of the summer Workshop on Molecular Evolution at Woods Hole.

Welkin began his faculty career as an Assistant Professor (2005-2011) and later as an Associate Professor (2011-2012) of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School, where he was also a member of the Graduate Program in Virology. He joined the Biology Department at Boston College in early 2012, where he currently enjoys coffee, research, explaining to undergraduates why viruses are cool, and attending the occasional football game (not necessarily in that order).

Animals harbor viruses with the potential of being transmitted to humans. HIV, SARS coronavirus, Ebola virus, Zika virus and MERS coronavirus all originated in animal reservoirs. Humanity’s ever-increasing reach into almost all ecological niches, combined with the high density of the human population results in a high likelihood of additional zoonotic transmissions of viruses. Yet, our understanding of the actual process of adaptation to new host species, like humans, is very limited. In many cases, we only become aware of such viruses after they have already spread in humans (or other animals) for years or even decades. I use retroviruses, including simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and simian foamy virus (SFV), to study the process of viral emergence. The questions of how a virus has to change to function well in a novel host species, as well as host immune factors limiting the spread of viruses transmitted from other species are the main focus of my research, and I use molecular as well as evolutionary analyses to gain a better understanding of viral cross-species transmission.

Laura Hall is a senior research associate in the Biology Department at Boston College.