Eric Freundt, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Tampa. His research focuses on the molecular and cell biology of virus replication.

Eric Freundt earned his B.S. in Biology with University Honors from Middle Tennessee State University in 1998.  As an undergraduate at MTSU, Eric worked under the mentorship of Steve Wright, Ph.D. to detect enteroviral genetic sequences in patient CSF samples. Eric then joined the Oxford - NIH Biomedical Research Scholars program, where he studied in the laboratories of Xioning Xu, Ph.D. and Michael Lenardo, MD at the University of Oxford and the National Institutes of Health. As a graduate student, he focused on understanding the functions of accessory proteins expressed by the SARS coronavirus.

For his postdoctoral research, Eric worked in the laboratory of Karla Kirkegaard, Ph.D. at Stanford University, where he was co-mentored by Michel Brahic, MD, Ph.D., and studied the spread of Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus and aggregated alpha-synuclein in cells of the central nervous system.

Eric joined the faculty of the University of Tampa in the fall of 2011, where he continues to investigate the SARS coronavirus and Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus and their interactions with host cells during infection.