After receiving my undergraduate degree in Biology at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I enrolled in the PhD program in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine at Hershey. I had the good fortune to join Dr. John Wills' laboratory where I studied the role of the retroviral Gag protein in particle assembly. With an interest in viral assembly and structure, I then began a post-doctoral fellowship in nodavirus assembly with Annette Schneemann at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. This provided the perfect opportunity to study RNA packing in icosahedral viruses with excellent structural collaboration with Jack Johnson's crystallography/cryoEM group. I then accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Department of Microbiology & Molecular Cell Biology at Eastern Virginia Medical School and advanced to the rank of Tenured Professor. My research program at EVMS focused on astrovirus capsid assembly where we discovered, along with my colleague Dr. Kenji Cunnion, that the astrovirus capsid protein is capable of inhibiting the classical and lectin pathways of the human complement system. We narrowed this activity down from a 787 amino acid protein to a 15 residue peptide which was subsequently rearranged to a highly potent molecule known as RLS-0071. In addition to inhibiting the classical and lectin pathways of complement, we also demonstrated that this molecule modulates neutrophil activity. Realizing the therapeutic potential of this molecule as an anti-inflammatory compound, Dr. Cunnion and I formed ReAlta Life Sciences (www.realtalifesciences.com) for therapeutic development of RLS-0071. RLS-0071 has completed clinical phase 1 testing in human volunteers. Along with RLS-0071, ReAlta has developed over 150 versions of the "EPICC" peptides.