Hiral Patel started working for Michael Lederman in May of 2017 as a Research Assistant.  For the past 17 years, prior to joining his research group, she worked with Dr. Charles Hoppel in the Department of Pharmacology at Case Western Reserve University studying mitochondrial disease.  She uses her expansive knowledge of enzyme assays to help the laboratory study mitochondrial activity in HIV-infected CD4+ cells.  She also works on a project involving the generation of macrophages from monocytes to study productive and latent infection.  Hiral is glad to have joined this research group in particular because it gives her the opportunity to learn immunology, a different branch of science than what she is used to.