Dr. Nilsson-Payant, Benjamin E.
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Postdoctoral Fellow
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(0)511-220027-203
Benjamin Nilsson-Payant is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Experimental Virology at TWINCORE. He gained his B.Sc. in Biology from Imperial College London (London, UK) in 2013. Subsequently, he moved to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford to pursue his D.Phil. under the supervision of Professor Ervin Fodor. In his doctoral thesis (“Viral and host factors regulating influenza virus replication”) he characterized the role of the PB2 627-domain as well as the host factor ANP32A in influenza virus replication and host adaptation. After receiving his D.Phil. in 2017, he joined Professor Benjamin tenOever’s laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York, USA) as a postdoctoral fellow in 2018. During his postdoctoral studies he studied the role of small viral RNAs in influenza virus replication and the induction of the host immune response. In early 2020, shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Benjamin Nilsson-Payant was one of the co-lead authors to publish the first characterization of the host transcriptional response to SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro, ex vivo, in vivo and in SARS-CoV-2 patients. These findings provide the basis for our understanding of the mechanisms of the COVID-19 disease. In addition, he co-lead and participated in numerous other high-profile publications detailing the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on different tissue/cell types and potential antiviral strategies against COVID-19. In 2022, Benjamin Nilsson-Payant joined the Institute of Experimental Virology at TWINCORE and is currently building his own junior research group with a focus on understanding the role of defective viral genomes in viral replication and innate immune induction of negative-sense RNA viruses, including influenza virus and hantaviruses. He is also part of the RESIST Cluster of Excellence as well as the Center for Infection Biology (ZIB).
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