Dr. Goepfert has concentrated his research efforts into understanding the characteristics of HIV-specific CD8+ T cells that impact upon control of viral replication, and how virus fitness may be impaired when virus is forced to escape certain T cell responses. Part of this work includes a better understanding of the quality of CD8+T cells that are associated with improved HIV-1 control and disease outcome. His research also focuses on studying immune responses to epitopes derived from the translation of alternative HIV-1 reading frames. These so called cryptic epitopes can be synthesized from both sense and anti-sense RNA transcripts and may represent a potential target for vaccine directed immune responses. All of his work has had direct relevance to our understanding of T cell immunopathogenesis of AIDS, and how vaccines that stimulate T cells should be designed to have maximum impact upon the virus.