Ben Berkhout studied molecular biology at Leiden University and obtained his Ph.D. in 1986 on a research project concerning the regulation of translation by means of RNA structure in RNA bacteriophages. He per formed postdoctoral research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute of the Harvard Medical School in the U.S. in the field of molecular immunology, and initiated HIV-1 research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. He initiated a molecular virology research line in 1991, and has been at the University of Amsterdam since then. He became Head of the Laboratory of Experimental Virology and was appointed as full professor in 2002. Ben Berkhout is editor for the Journal of Biomedical Science, Retrovirology, Journal of General Virology, and associate editor for several journals. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts on diverse topics concerning HIV-1 replication, virus evolution, virus discovery, new antiviral therapeutic strategies and HIV-1 vaccine design.