Alec Zhan is an MD/PhD student at the Medical College of Georgia, currently in his first graduate year of training as a part of the Biomedical Engineering program at Georgia Tech. He works in Dr. Gregory Melikian’s lab at Emory, where he studies HIV protease dynamics. By developing a FRET-based biosensor to track protease activity in real time, his work aims to reveal new insights into the critical timing and control of HIV protease activity as well as its close relationship to the viral maturation process.