Program

Dr. David M. Margolis is a professor of Medicine, Microbiology & Immunology, and Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  A graduate of Tufts University School of Medicine, he trained in medicine at the New England Medical Center, infectious diseases at the NIAID, and did post-doctoral research in the regulation of HIV gene expression at the University of Massachusetts Program in Molecular Medicine.  He is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
 
Dr. Margolis' laboratory studies molecular interactions between HIV and the host cell, with an eye to use these insights to improve the treatment of HIV infection, and the management of the HIV pandemic.  Current work focuses on the molecular mechanisms that control the latent reservoir of HIV infection within resting T cells.  The group has described two distinct and specific mechanisms to recruit the chromatin remodeling enzyme, histone deacetylase 1, to the proviral promoter.  These insights guide studies that test novel reagents to perturb latency in T cells obtained from HIV+ patients, followed by small clinical proof-of-concept experiments to deplete persistent HIV infection in HIV+ volunteers.