Dr. Sebla Kutluay

Dr. Sebla Kutluay received her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Michigan State University in 2009 under the mentorship of Dr. Steven Triezenberg on her project “Regulation of chromatin during herpes simplex virus type-1 lytic infection.” Dr. Kutluay did her undergraduate work in Biological Science, Bioengineering, and Chemistry as Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey.

From MSU, Dr. Kutluay went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at the Rockefeller University in New York. Her project “Molecular biology of HIV-1 replication and virus-host interactions” was done under the guidance of Dr. Paul Bieniasz.

Dr. Kutluay is currently an Assistant Professor of in the Department of Molecular Microbiology in the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the basic molecular biology of how HIV-1 replication is regulated by host and viral RNA-binding proteins and targeting these interactions so as to block HIV-1 replication in infected cells. Among her numerous honors, she is the recipient of the Andy Kaplan Prize in Retrovirology and the Washington University Andrew and Virginia Craig Faculty Fellowship.