Contributors

COURTESY OF ERIC DELWARTEric Delwart moved from Switzerland in 1982 to work at a biotech firm in San Francisco, an early epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. When he began a PhD in 1984 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, HIV had just been identified as the retrovirus responsible for AIDS, and that drew him into the field of retrovirology. “It was very exciting,” he says, to work on a subject so urgent, and “there was then a lot of optimism about an HIV vaccine.” Delwart continued studying HIV during a postdoc at Stanford University and while a PI at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center through the 1990s.

Delwart turned his attention to the field of emerging and unknown viruses—which far outnumber identified viruses—as a PI at the Blood Systems Research Institute, an affiliate of the University of California, San Francisco. Before modern genomic methods, “we didn’t have the technology to see these viruses,” Delwart says. “This whole universe is being revealed to us in the form of sequence information. What’s lagging behind is our knowledge of what these viruses actually do.”

Delwart delves into that universe in a feature article “Viruses of the Human Body.”

COURTESY OF PAUL NUNEZIn the early 1970s, Paul Nunez, armed with a master’s and PhD in engineering and physics, was working as a theoretical physicist when he made a dramatic career change. He met Reginald Bickford, a pioneering neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who at the time was looking for technically skilled scientists to help with electroencephalography (EEG) experiments. “I had always been interested in the brain,” Nunez says, “but I didn’t even know what a neuron was.” Nevertheless, he dove into the field and spent the next 10 years as a postdoc under Bickford. The unexplained phenomenon of alpha rhythms, a type of brain wave now associated with vision and attentiveness, particularly interested Nunez, and his theories on the topic began to garner some recognition.