Karla Kirkegaard is professor and former chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford. Her laboratory has focused on the mechanisms of variation, survival and spread of viruses whose genetic material is composed of single strands of RNA. Kirkegaard has received many awards, including a Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health, an Ellison Senior Scholarship in Global Infectious Disease and election as a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recently, she has collaborated with Michel Brahic, a neurovirologist, to study the traffic and spread of viruses along and from neurons. They have found that aggregated proteins may behave similarly to viruses in cultured primary neurons, leading to her present investigations into the cellular mechanisms of the apparently non-lytic egress of both viruses and aggregated proteins such as alpha-synuclein.