Frank Aylward
Elected Member
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA United States
Current term (2023 - 2026): First
Frank received a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Arizona in 2008 and a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. For his PhD work he studied symbiotic microbial communities associated with leaf-cutter ants in Panama. He completed a postdoc at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he examined diel cycling of marine microbial and viral activities. He then joined the Biological Sciences department at Virginia Tech in 2017, where he is now an associate professor. Frank has worked with a wide range of microbial and viral systems, and currently focuses mostly on large DNA viruses, especially “giant viruses” and large bacteriophages. He chaired an ICTV study group on giant viruses starting in 2021, and he joined the ICTV EC as an elected member in 2023.
