I am a physician researcher and faculty member of the University of California, San Francisco in the Division of Experimental Medicine (DEM) with over 20 years of patient-oriented laboratory, translational and clinical research experience. One focus of my research activities is to discover and implement strategies to achieve long-term antiretroviral (ART)-free remission in people with HIV (PWH) in my collaborative patient-oriented research group. My group has made several key contributions to the field of HIV persistence including seminal studies on the reduction in viral reservoir size and subsequent HIV recrudescence following allogeneic stem-cell transplantation and very-early ART initiation during hyperacute infection. In addition, we have made several major advances on identifying and targeting non-viral biomarkers of HIV-infected cells and implemented novel and innovative non-invasive positron emission tomography (PET)-based approaches to characterize HIV persistence. These studies represent the first in vivo molecular imaging studies of HIV infection in humans. Leveraging several NIH R01 and similar grants, we are applying this approach to enhance understanding of HIV persistence before and after initiation of ART, during analytical treatment interruption to identify foci of HIV persistence and reactivation, and in the setting of combination immunotherapy studies such as HIV vaccination, TLR agonists and broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb) therapy to achieve long-term HIV control. We are now working to understand the impact of gene modified stem cells in the setting of autologous stem cell transplant for malignancy in PWH on ART including developing and implementing novel single-cell techniques to evaluate HIV persistence following SCT and determine if gene modified cells become infected in vivo. My laboratory expanded rapidly following emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic when I helped implement and co-lead the UCSF Longitudinal Immunological Impact of COVID-19 (LIINC) study which is involved in understanding mechanisms of the long-term clinical impact of COVID-19 on persistent sequelae.