Peter Palese is a Professor of Microbiology and the Chair of the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His research is in the area of RNA-containing viruses with a special emphasis on influenza viruses and more recently SARS-CoV-2. He has been a pioneer in the field of reverse genetics for negative strand RNA viruses, which is crucial for the study of the structure/function relationships of viral genes, for investigation of viral pathogenicity and for development and manufacture of novel vaccines. An improvement of this technique has been effectively used by him and his colleagues to reconstruct and study the pathogenicity of the highly virulent, but extinct, 1918 pandemic influenza virus. In recent years most of the efforts by Palese and his Mount Sinai collaborators, Adolfo Garcia-Sastre and Florian Krammer, have been directed at developing a Universal Influenza Virus
Vaccine and a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for low and middle income countries. Peter Palese is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
