Throughout its 50-year history, Fred Hutch Cancer Center has distinguished itself as a leader in the study of viruses, cancer-causing viral infections and infectious diseases, especially during the pandemic when as many as 20% of Fred Hutch researchers had active projects related to COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes it.
Two of those researchers — virologist Keith Jerome, MD, PhD, and evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom, PhD — were recently elected to the 2025 class of fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology.
Each year, fellows of the Academy, who form an honorific leadership group within AAM, are selected by their peers based on their original contributions to microbiology and records of scientific achievement.
Jerome’s work on viruses that cause chronic, incurable infections shows that it may one day be possible to use gene therapy to cure infections like herpes simplex (HSV).
Bloom focuses on the evolution of genes and proteins to understand how genetic mutations shape the ability of fast-evolving viruses — such as the ones that cause influenza and COVID-19 — to infect and spread.
