Carol A. Carter

Biosketch

Carol Ann Carter, PhD, is Stony Brook University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of the Renaissance School of Medicine in Stony Brook, New York. She earned her BS in Biology (major) and Chemistry (minor) from the City College of New York (magna cum laude) and her MPhil and PhD in Microbiology from Yale University. She was a postdoctoral fellow in virology at the Roche Institute of Molecular Genetics and joined the Department of Microbiology faculty in 1975. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics within the university. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Awards include the Stony Brook University Presidential Award for Promoting Diversity and Academic Excellence (2013), the Suffolk County NY Martin Luther King, Jr Commission Public Service Award (2016), Long Island Innovator Award (2017), election to the National Academy of Inventors (2020) and the David Derse Memorial Award in Retrovirology (2024).

Research Interests

As an early pioneer in HIV research, Dr. Carter partnered with pharmaceutical companies and structural biologists to isolate and purify recombinant forms of the viral encoded protease and the viral capsid protein to advance understanding of their structural and biochemical properties and vulnerabilities for anti-viral drug design. Her groundbreaking research, published in PNAS in 2001, identified an interaction between a motif encoded in a structural protein of HIV-1 and a host protein, Tsg101, that is essential for the assembly and budding of viral particles from infected cells. By identifying this link to cellular machinery through a motif found in both host- and viral- encoded proteins, she opened a new field of investigation in both virology and cell biology. Studies by many others in the field of yeast genetics, yeast biochemistry, cell biology and virology led to our current understanding that viruses exploit their link to Tsg101 to access ESCRT (endosomal sorting complex required for transport) machinery to exit infected cells. Adding to the significance and impact of the initial finding, Dr. Carter’s current work with collaborating virologists, structural biologists and medicinal chemists, corroborated by others, has demonstrated “proof-of-principle” that Tsg101 could be a feasible target for therapeutic interventions selectively targeting HIV and several other enveloped virus infections. Current research focuses on elucidating mechanisms underlying Tsg101 participation in virus vs host-directed events.