David Montefiori is Professor and Director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development in the Department of Surgery at Duke University Medical Center.  His major research interests are viral immunology and AIDS vaccine development, with a special emphasis on neutralizing antibodies.  One of his highest priorities is to identify immunogens that generate broadly cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 for inclusion in vaccines. 

 

His work with HIV-1 began in 1985 while in the Department of Pathology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he developed one of the earliest high throughput assays to measure HIV-1 neutralization.  He moved to Duke in 1993, where he continued his studies of the antibody responses in HIV-1 infected people and in nonhuman primate models of AIDS virus infection and vaccination. 

 

For the past two decades his laboratory has served as a national and international resource for standardized assessments of neutralizing antibody responses in preclinical and clinical trials of candidate AIDS vaccines.  His laboratory is funded by the National Institutes of Health as part of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) and the Primate Core Immunology/Virology Laboratories.  His laboratory also receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD).  He has published over 300 original research papers that have helped shape the scientific rationale for antibody-based HIV-1 vaccines.