Sheena Saayman's Biography

Sheena Saayman, Postdoctoral Fellow, The Scripps Research Institute

Sheena Saayman, PhD, is a James Gear Postdoctoral Fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in the laboratory of Kevin Morris. She received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Molecular Biology from The University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Dr. Saayman’s research career has focused largely on the development of novel RNA-based therapeutic strategies specifically targeting infectious disease agents such as HIV. Her graduate research encompassed the development of novel combinatorial RNAi modalities to inhibit HIV-1. She designed and generated expressed long hairpin RNA constructs and carried out some of the pioneering work showing that multiple unique RNAi-effector sequences can be generated from a single therapeutic modality. Dr. Saayman’s postdoctoral research has investigated the role of non-coding RNAs in host-pathogen interactions during HIV-1 infection and has focused in particular on the role of an HIV-encoded long non-coding RNA and its potential role in the establishment and maintenance of viral latency.