Our lab is particularly interested in studying the mechanisms that generate anti-viral broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) especially those that are rare and takes a long time to generate such as anti-HIV bnAbs. Such anti-HIV bnAbs have common characteristics such as frequent insertion and deletion in the antibody genes, long CDR3, high frequency of point mutations and are often poly/autoreactive. Our aims are to understand how these special features of the bnAbs are generated during the process of SHM and ultimately apply the knowledge learnt to speed up the process that generate bnAbs. Our long term goal is to establish approaches to efficiently fight diseases and prevent cancer.