Dr. Ann-Kathrin Reuschl is a postdoctoral Research Associate within the Division of Infection & Immunity at University College London. With a background in infection immunology, she undertook a PhD at Imperial College London during which she explored early interactions between M. tuberculosis and primary human airway epithelium, showing an underappreciated contribution of the epithelium to local inflammation during infection. In 2016, Ann-Kathrin joined Prof Clare Jolly’s team at UCL where she started to interrogate how HIV-1 reprograms its target, the human primary CD4+ T cell. When the pandemic struck, her research pivoted to SARS-CoV-2 host-pathogen interactions. Ann-Kathrin could draw upon her expertise in airway epithelial cell and infection biology to aid the establishment of a SARS-CoV-2 research program at the Division of Infection and Immunity at UCL. As part of a national and international collaboration, she has contributed to fundamental discoveries about SARS-CoV-2 infection biology as well as exploring therapeutic targets. Crucially, this work showed how SARS-CoV-2 evolution allowed the virus to evade the human innate immune response (Thorne et al, Nature, 2021). This work has implications for the molecular host-pathogen interactions of emerging variants that shape the immunological niche in which the virus resides.