Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Viruses, I am pleased to announce the winners of the Young Investigator in Virology Award and the two Travel Awards:

The 2015 Young Investigator in Virology Award for excellence in virology research goes to Dr. Jesse D. Bloom. After receiving his Ph.D. with Frances Arnold, he carried out postdoctoral work with David Baltimore, both at Caltech. Since 2011 he has been an Assistant Member in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Dr. Bloom’s research combines experimental and computational approaches to study influenza virus. A major strength of his research is to seamlessly integrate molecular virology, next-generation sequencing, and computational biology to ask critical questions about influenza virus evolution. Dr. Bloom will also have the opportunity to present his work at the Viruses 2016 - At the Forefront of Virus–Host Interactions conference, Basel, 26–28 January 2016.

The runner-up is Dr. Alexander Ploss, Princeton University. Dr. Ploss performed his Ph.D. research at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York in the lab of Eric Palmer and did postdoctoral research with Charles Rice at Rockefeller University. In 2013, he became an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. Dr. Ploss’s research is focused on addressing fundamental questions about hepatitis C virus replication using humanized mouse model systems.

Travel Awards were granted to Dr. Kirsty Renfree Short, post-doctoral researcher at Erasmus Medical Center, and to Dr. Redmond Smyth from the Institut de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire, Strasbourg, France.

I would like to congratulate them all for this remarkable achievement!

Eric O. Freed

Editor–in–Chief Viruses (ISSN 1999-4915) Impact Factor 3.279 (2013 Journal Citation Reports®),

Please join the Viruses 2016 - At the Forefront of Virus–Host Interactions conference, Basel, 26–28 January 2016.