Dr. Alexandra Schuetz received her Ph.D. from the University of Saarland in collaboration with Bayer HealthCare AG, Germany in 2004. After being involved in HIV/TB co-infection research in collaboration with Mbeya Medical Research Program, Tanzania and working as a project coordinator at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering, she started working with MHRP in 2006 and relocated first to Mbeya, Tanzania, where she served as Head of Immunology and Specimen Processing. Here she developed in-country research capacity, designed and executed immunology research in the context of HIV vaccine trials and continued her research on HIV/TB co-infection. In 2008 she moved with MHRP to Bangkok, Thailand and is since then involved in research on acute HIV infection, cure studies and HIV vaccine trials.
Her Lab in Thailand works to understanding the mechanisms by which HIV infection causes dysfunction of the gastrointestinal and reproductive tract, and the lymphoid immune systems. One of the main objectives of her work is to better understand the mucosal determinants of HIV transmission and events occurring during early acute HIV infection and their implication for the development of potential vaccine and cure strategies. In parallel, the Schuetz Lab is conducting research characterizing mucosal, lymphoid and peripheral immune responses in the context of the RV144 follow up studies and other novel vaccine strategies to determine potential mechanisms of protection and to help developing future HIV vaccine candidates.
