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Jeannette Tenthorey, PhD (she/her)
Jay A. Levy Assistant Professor of Virology
HHMI Hanna Gray Faculty Fellow
University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Tenthorey is broadly interested in the mechanics of how the innate immune system is built to withstand the evolutionary pressures of many different kinds of viral infections. She and her lab tackle this question from a variety of different angles, including retrospective evolutionary analysis, forward genetic screens, structural biology, and biophysical analysis. Jeannette embarked on her training in host-pathogen biology as undergraduate at Reed College, where she studied virulence regulation in enteropathogenic E. coli. She went on to cut her teeth in biochemistry as a research technician with Dave Morgan at UCSF, studying the enzymology of the yeast anaphase-promoting complex. As a PhD student working with Russell Vance at UC Berkeley, Jeannette combined her love of infectious disease and biochemistry to investigate the structural mechanism of an innate immune sensor of intracellular bacterial pathogens. She completed her training in evolutionary biology as a postdoc with Harmit Malik at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center; there she probed the evolutionary landscape of an anti-retroviral protein to understand how it evolves to combat retroviral infection. Jeannette returned to UCSF in April 2023 to start her own lab. She was appointed the Jay A. Levy Professor of Virology in 2025.