February Meeting #2(Zoom) 2/24/21

A Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Update on Vaccines and Viral Variants

A year after the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, cases in our country continue to be numerous. Mitigation measures, mask-wearing, social distancing, and widespread testing have helped control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but many of these strategies are not sustainable for long periods. Recently developed vaccines, rigorously tested for safety and efficacy, are critical to slow down virus transmission in our communities and offer much-needed hope. But what are these vaccines? How do they work? Are they effective against viral variants? Are they safe? In this conversation, we will discuss recent evidence generated by numerous studies addressing these and other questions.

Dr. Carolina Arias spoke to the SEC in March 2020, just before SARS-CoV-2 reached Santa Barbara County. She is an Assistant Professor in UCSB's Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. Dr. Arias earned a PhD in Microbiology at New York University (NYU) Sackler Institute for Graduate Biomedical Sciences in 2008, where she studied virus-host interactions in herpesvirus and poxvirus. As a postdoc in the laboratory of Dr. Don Ganem at UC San Francisco and then at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Dr. Arias studied genome-wide transcriptional and translational regulation of the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus. In January 2016, Dr. Arias joined the laboratory of Dr. Joseph DeRisi at UCSF, where she conducted comprehensive drug screens to identify FDA-approved compounds that could be used to curtail Zika virus infection. Dr. Arias joined the UCSB faculty late in 2016.