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Dr. Michael Summers is the Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring and Distinguished University Professor at UMBC, and also an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Research in his laboratory is aimed at understanding how HIV-1 and other retroviruses assemble in infected cells and package their RNA genomes. His recent work focuses on retroviral RNA packaging and the development of NMR tools to study large RNAs. He and his students showed that genome packaging by HIV-1 and an evolutionarily older retrovirus, MoMuLV, is regulated by a dimerization-dependent RNA structural switch mechanism, in which residues essential for genome packaging are sequestered by base pairing in the monomeric RNA and become exposed to promote protein binding and packaging upon dimerization. They developed a novel NMR method that enabled structural probing of the intact HIV-1 leader (> 700 nucleotide dimer), and showed that the leader undergoes dimerization-dependent remodeling that sequesters signals important for splicing and translation, and exposes NC binding sites. They also identified a minimal region of the HIV-1 leader sufficient to direct RNA packaging, and determined its structure. They are currently studying the protein-RNA complexes that appear to be important for nucleating the assembly of new viruses