Where are you at this time and what are you most likely to be doing?

1-4 AM: cells, viruses, and molecules don’t sleep. The cells in our incubators will be doubling (every 12-24h), the viruses will be infecting the cells (making more viruses), and the molecules will be finding partners to form molecular chains (polymers).

What tells you it’s not going as expected? What do you do when that happens?

The unexpected can be bad or good. Budget cuts, rejected proposals or manuscripts, failed experiments. Or funded proposals, manuscripts accepted for publication, and new insights from our research. The ups and downs are all part of being an academic, having the freedom to pursue the ideas that I find most engaging or potentially impactful. The unexpected highs or lows go with the job, and they keep life in the lab interesting.

As we sleep, the living world inside our lab incubators is wide awake. Cells are dividing, viruses are invading, and infections are spreading. In our lab, we make the invisible visible: this movie shows a rabies-like virus sweeping across a community of rodent cells. The white glow marks infected cells as the virus takes hold, hijacking them to produce more virus, while the infection spreads to neighboring cells. By watching how infections unfold in real time and studying how virus genomic programs change we are uncovering forces that drive viral evolution. We are using such insights to design next-generation immune-based therapies that not only fight infections today, but also resist the ways viruses try to escape tomorrow. The movie runs from 7 to 21 hours post infection (HPI).