Ashokkumar Manickam is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill since February 2020. His research is focusing on understanding the fundamentals of co-repressor complex mechanism involved in latently infected cells during acute HIV infection. Ashok did his Ph.D in Immunology at National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (Indian Council of Medical Research), Chennai, India. His doctoral thesis was to understand molecular mechanism of the ability of few HIV-1 virus which are capable of establishing infections while the majority of the viruses compromising the infectiousness for survival, if not, for other reasons. He has been working in the field of HIV from 2013 and he also involved in in-vitro screening of compounds with anti-HIV activity. To his research credit, Ashok received HIV Research trust fellowship to carry out his part of research in Karolinska institute, Sweden, 2017. Ashok presented his research findings in several conferences as poster/oral presentations and published more than 10 papers in peer reviewed journals in the field of HIV.