The Wistar Institute, an international biomedical research leader in cancer, immunology and infectious diseases, announces the appointment of Daniel W. Kulp, Ph.D., as associate professor in the Vaccine Center and the Translational Tumor Immunology Program.

Kulp’s research centers on how to best rationally engineer protective immune responses against emerging and harmful infectious diseases using computer designed vaccines. His goal is to create vaccines and engineered antibody therapies that will eradicate a host of infectious diseases related to HIV and arenaviruses, a family of viruses that include Lassa virus (LASV), a disease which causes hemorrhagic fever that affects hundreds of thousands of people in Africa each year. His unique computational and engineering expertise will allow him to translate his work for the development of innovative cancer therapeutics.

“I am thrilled to welcome Dan to The Wistar Institute and specifically our Vaccine Center. His computational and directed engineering methods will be integral to the highly collaborative and transformational Wistar vaccine research community and scientific enterprise as a whole,” said Dario C. Altieri, M.D., Wistar president and CEO, director of the Cancer Center, and the Robert and Penny Fox Distinguished Professor.

“Wistar has a rich history of inventing vaccines and therapeutics, and its Vaccine Center continues to be a leader in vaccine research and development, including many efforts on HIV,” said Kulp. “My lab will focus on generating antibody-based vaccines and engineering new antibodies to address the need for therapies against a litany of disease targets such as arenaviruses, HIV and cancer.”

Kulp has more than 15 years of experience developing molecular design software and leading protein engineering projects. He joins Wistar from The Scripps Research Institute and International AIDS Vaccine Initiative where he was a principal scientist. Kulp received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Molecular Biology & Biochemistry from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, followed by a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed postdoctoral training in structure-based and experimental protein engineering at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The Wistar Institute is an international leader in biomedical research with special expertise in cancer, immunology, infectious diseases and vaccine development. Founded in 1892 as the first independent nonprofit biomedical research institute in the United States, Wistar has held the prestigious Cancer Center designation from the National Cancer Institute since 1972. The Institute works actively to ensure that research advances move from the laboratory to the clinic as quickly as possible. wistar.org.