Maria Tokuyama

Dr. Tokuyama is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Faculty of Science and a Michael Smith Health Research Scholar. Dr. Tokuyama has extensive experience working at the intersection of viruses and the immune system including endogenous retroviruses, CMV, HSV, Flu, and SARS-CoV-2, using mouse models and clinical samples. Dr. Tokuyama was a key member of the Yale pandemic response IMPACT Team during the pandemic, contributing to the development of saliva-based SARS-CoV-2 testing and COVID-19 immune profiling. Dr. Tokuyama was recently awarded the CIHR Pandemic Preparedness and Health Emergencies Early Career Investigator Prize for her research on investigating novel mechanisms of antiviral immunity against HSV-2 and will leverage her expertise in virus-immune interactions and bioinformatics to assess BCR sequences enriched in clinical specimens for antibody generation.