Jose Luiz Proenca-Modena, PhD

Research Fields of Interest
Emerging viruses, Viral infection, Innate immunity, Viral Pathogenesis

PhD, head of the Laboratory of Emerging Viruses (LEVE) at Unicamp

José is a biologist and received his MsC and PhD degree from the School of Medicine at
University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the
Virology Research Center at University of São Paulo and at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis working in Michael Diamond’s Laboratory.

In 2015, José was hired as an assistant professor by University of Campinas
(Unicamp) and since 2020, he has been working as an associate professor in the
Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Biology at
Unicamp. Currently, he heads a Laboratory of Emerging Viruses (LEVE,
https://leve.ib.unicamp.br/) where he is conducting researches about pathogenesis of
Oropouche virus (OROV), Zika virus (ZIKV), Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and the
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). During the COVID-19
pandemic, Proença-Modena worked to mitigate the social and public health impact
of this disease in the metropolitan region of Campinas, having a leading role for
molecular diagnosis, scientific dissemination, and development of research that has
contributed to the understanding of new epidemiological, evolutionary and
pathophysiological aspects of COVID-19. He published 90 papers in indexed journals and wrote three book chapters in virology and microbiology.