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Engineers Week: ‘What’s the big deal about COVID-19 variants and why should we care?’
February 22, 2021 @ 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
The Bioengineering Department presents speaker Lee Makowski for this year’s Engineers Week events.
Location: This event is virtual, free, and open to the public.
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Meeting ID: 951 5370 0231
Passcode: 312358
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‘What’s the big deal about COVID-19 variants and why should we care?’
Lee Makowski Professor and Department Chair, Department of Bioengineering
Lee Makowski, Professor and Department Chair, Department of Bioengineering
Vaccines developed to protect against infection with SARS CoV-2 virus are less effective against some viral variants that have recently arisen. How is that possible, and what can we do about it? In this presentation I will outline how vaccines are designed, why some variants can evade neutralization by the vaccines and others cannot, and discuss why I believe there will be ‘booster’ vaccines developed against the variants, probably available by late summer.
Dr. Makowski is Professor and Chair of Bioengineering and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University. He has a BS in Physics from Brown University and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT. His research interests focus on the molecular basis of biological processes. In 2010, he moved from Argonne National Laboratory where he was Biosciences Division Director and Senior Scientist to Northeastern University where he accepted a joint appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chemistry and Chemical Biology. In January 2014 Dr. Makowski was appointed as Interim Chair of the newly established Department of Bioengineering and became Chair in September 2015. His current research program aspires to understand the inception and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. With the emergence of COVID-19, he redirected his efforts to try to understand the array of unexpected extrapulmonary impacts SARS CoV-2 has on some patients.
