This blog post is about: It was 2003, just four years after the first known outbreak of Nipah virus occurred in Malaysia and around the time a second outbreak occurred in Bangladesh. Dr. Hector Aguilar-Carreño had just decided to focus his research on the Nipah virus, instead of expanding on his postdoctoral lab’s research on HIV. “The more I looked into the Nipah virus the more interested I became,” says Aguilar-Carreño. In retrospect, he made the right choice: “We became famous for being the pioneers for studying how the Nipah virus makes its way into cells.” Now an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Cornell, Aguilar-Carreño continues working towards unveiling how this virus causes disease.