Basic Virology
John M. Coffin, Ph.D. is American Cancer Society Professor and Distinguished Professor, molecular Biology and Microbiology, Tufts University, Boston MA. He also serves as advisor on HIV and AIDS to the National Cancer Institute and to the HIV Drug Resistance Program (DRP), which he founded in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1972, where he worked on retroviruses in the laboratory of Howard Temin.
He joined the Tufts faculty after 3 years with Charles Weissmann at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. In 1997, he was recruited to organize the DRP, of which he served as Director until 2005. He is well known for his work on retrovirus genetics, genome structure, and evolution, and is author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, and senior editor of Retroviruses, the definitive text on the subject. In 1999, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his contributions to the field of retrovirology.