How to Hit HIV Where It Hurts

HIV continues to wreak havoc around the world, especially in poor countries.  A vaccine is urgently needed to overcome this major global health challenge.  I will describe key challenges that must be confronted to achieve this goal.  I will then focus on some work that aims to address a part of these challenges by bringing together theory and computation (rooted in statistical physics), consideration of structures of multi-protein assemblies, basic immunology, and human clinical data.  The results of these studies suggest the design of immunogens that could be components of vaccines that might elicit immune responses which might be able to hit HIV where it hurts upon natural infection.  I shall also briefly touch upon some scaling laws that describe HIV evolution, which are reminiscent of Hopfield dynamics and other branches of physics.