Virally-transmitted infectious diseases pose tremendous burdens on human health. Michael Vahey’s lab’s goal is to understand the physical and biological factors that guide the assembly, transmission, and replication of enveloped viruses, with the long-term objective of targeting and repurposing these processes to develop new therapeutics. Using an interdisciplinary approach that spans multiple scales, the group is working to understand how individual molecules collectively give rise to the characteristics of a virus, and how these characteristics determine the virus’s ability to propagate under the constraints found in cells, tissues, and organisms.