Dr. Andrea L. Cox is an Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, with appointments in the Departments of Medicine and Oncology and in the Immunology Program. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, where she worked on characterization of peptide antigens, including tumor antigen identification. She subsequently completed an M.D. and internal medicine and infectious disease training at Johns Hopkins. She is a board-certified infectious disease specialist, specializing in the treatment of patients with hepatitis virus infections. She also practices HIV and general infectious disease medicine. Her laboratory investigates human immune responses to chronic viral infections. She is principally interested in mechanisms through which these infections stimulate and evade immune responses, vaccine development, and immunotherapy of chronic viral infections. The overall goal of her research is to understand immune system failure to clear chronic viral infections in order to overcome the mechanisms of immune evasion that limit the efficacy of viral vaccines and therapy. To date, Dr. Cox has contributed substantially to our understanding of the immune response to acute HCV infection, defining characteristics associated with development of persistent infection. In addition to characterizing humoral and early cytokine responses to acute HCV, she has demonstrated that CD8+ T cell responses generated early decline with progression to chronic infection through multiple mechanisms. These discoveries led to an immunotherapy clinical trial in chronic HCV and new concepts in prophylactic HCV vaccine design. She is currently the co–Principal Investigator on the first prophylactic HCV vaccine trial.