Paula Cevaal is a post-doctoral scientist in the laboratory of Prof. Sharon Lewin at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She received her MSc training at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, working amongst others with Prof. Linda-Gail Bekker (UCT, South Africa) on TB/HIV-coinfections. She then spent a year doing youth advocacy work at AIDS2018, after which she completed a PhD under joint supervision of Prof. Sharon Lewin and Prof. Frank Caruso – a world leader in nanotechnology. Working in this interface of translational virology and materials science, she focused on developing non-viral vectors that could efficiently deliver therapeutics to primary CD4+ T cells. She has extensive skills in assessing and quantifying nanoparticle-T cell interactions. Specifically, she led a new line of research pioneering lipid nanoparticles for the delivery of mRNA-based latency-reversing agents to the latent HIV reservoir. The overarching goal of her work is to further gene editing-related strategies to the clinic.
