Nitasha Kumar, PhD

Director

Nitasha (she/her/hers) grew up in Melbourne, Australia. She became interested in infectious disease research during her travels in South Africa and India. She completed her PhD in HIV cure research with Sharon Lewin and Paul Cameron and came out to USA for her postdoctoral studies with Guido Silvestri at Emory University, Atlanta and Steven Yukl at San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Centre.

When not in the lab, Nitasha loves to cook, read, swim and hike.
Publications

  1. Peluso MJ, Ryder D, Flavell R, Wang Y, Levi J, LaFranchi BH, Deveau TM, Buck AM, Munter SE, Asare KA, Aslam M, Koch W, Szabo G, Hoh R, Deswal M, Rodriguez A, Buitrago M, Tai V, Shrestha U, Lu S, Goldberg SA, Dalhuisen T, Durstenfeld MS, Hsue PY, Kelly JD, Kumar N, Martin JN, Gambir A, Somsouk M, Seo Y, Deeks SG, Laszik ZG, VanBrocklin HF, Henrich TJ. Multimodal Molecular Imaging Reveals Tissue-Based T Cell Activation and Viral RNA Persistence for Up to 2 Years Following COVID-19. medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences 2023. PMID: 37577714


  2. Lu MD, Telwatte S, Kumar N, Ferreira F, Martin HA, Kadiyala GN, Wedrychowski A, Moron-Lopez S, Chen TH, Goecker EA, Coombs RW, Lu CM, Wong JK, Tsibris A, Yukl SA. Novel assays to investigate the mechanisms of latent infection with HIV-2. PloS one 2022. PMID: 35476802


  3. Telwatte S, Kumar N, Vallejo-Gracia A, Kumar GR, Lu CM, Ott M, Wong JK, Yukl SA. Novel RT-ddPCR assays for simultaneous quantification of multiple noncoding and coding regions of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Journal of virological methods 2021. PMID: 33667568


  4. Telwatte S, Kumar N, Vallejo-Gracia A, Kumar GR, Lu CM, Ott M, Wong JK, Yukl SA. Novel RT-ddPCR Assays for determining the transcriptional profile of SARS-CoV-2. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology 2021. PMID: 33469579