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Dr. Mark Painter graduated from The University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota with a B.S. in Biology in 2014, and subsequently entered the Graduate Program in Immunology at the University of Michigan. There, he studied how HIV evades the immune response and establishes a persistent infection, working to develop therapeutic strategies to reverse these processes. He completed his Ph.D. in Immunology in November 2020. He began a postdoctoral research fellowship to study human immunology and vaccination in John Wherry's lab at the University of Pennsylvania in January 2021. His current focus is on immune responses following SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination, and his work has been published in journals including Science Immunology, Immunity, Nature Medicine, Science, and Cell.

In this episode, we talk about: 

1. What drew Mark Painter into the study of biology and virology?
2. Viruses, the elegance in their intricacies, and their place in the process of life.
3. The beauty found in Mark’s work in biology and virology.
4. The usefulness of beauty in understanding in the realm of science.
5. The obstacles in encountering beauty in science, and what can help scientists face those obstacles.
6. Mark’s insight into what could be done to establish more public trust in science, especially in the realm of vaccines.
7. Cultivating the love of science and reality through deep conversation over simply sharing facts.

Resources mentioned:

Mark Painter’s body of work and research he was involved in:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=mark+painter&btnG=

Sponsors:

This episode is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust as part of a grant on the aesthetic dimensions of science. It is also sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, and you can learn more about them here: www.iacs.usc.edu

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