 | Martin J. Blaser, M.D.
New York University School of Medicine | | Molecular definition of the bacterial population of human skin in health and disease
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
The human body is colonized by bacteria from birth through death. These bacteria live on and in us, colonizing the upper respiratory tract, the gastrointestinal tract, the genital tract, and the skin. In total, we carry many more bacterial cells than we carry human cells.
It has long been appreciated... (more) |
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 | John C. Boothroyd, Ph.D.
Stanford University School of Medicine | | Evolution of Virulence in Eukaryotic Pathogens
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
The role of sex in spread of a disease is usually thought of in terms of sexually transmitted diseases and sex between an infected host and an uninfected sexual partner. But sex between the pathogens themselves also plays a crucial role in how a given disease emerges and evolves. Such evolution can give rise to pathogens able to infect a wider variety... (more) |
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 | Ronald W. Davis, Ph.D.
Stanford University School of Medicine | | Sexually Transmitted Disease Agents in the “Healthy” Human Vagina
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
For more than 100 years, if you wanted to know what organisms were present in any given ecological niche, you took a swab from the niche and streaked the swab on an agar plate, incubated the plate, looked for colonies, and examined what grew. For a somewhat more sophisticated approach, you would streak the swab on several agar plates... (more) |
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 | Jack E. Dixon, Ph.D.
University of California - San Diego | | Bacterial Pathogen Families that Function in Both the Animal and Plant Kingdoms
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
Our laboratory discovered that a pathogen bacteria that once caused one of the world’s most feared disease, the plague, and a pathogenic bacteria that causes several diseases in plants use a common family of virulence factors to attack their host (1). The fact that these virulence factors appear to use a common... (more)(The first year of this research was conducted at the University of Michigan Medical School.) |
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 | Laurie H. Glimcher, M.D.
Harvard School of Public Health | | Arming the Immune System against Pathogens with Selective Biologics: The Next Generation of Vaccines
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
An effective immune response against infectious agents must be both of appropriate magnitude and type. Type 1 immunity relies on a type of T lymphocyte that induces both inflammatory and cytotoxic responses essential for destruction of intracellular pathogens such as tuberculosis. Generation of Type... (more) |
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 | Roberto G. Kolter, Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School | | Ecological Influences on Pathogen Genome Evolution
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
Most bacteria that exist on our planet do not cause diseases to humans. By and large these bacteria colonize diverse environments and carry out important processes in their habitats. Such processes are generally beneficial to humans. For example, only bacteria have the capacity to take the nitrogen that is abundant in the atmosphere, but which we... (more) |
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 | Pradipsinh K. Rathod, Ph.D.
University of Washington | | Genomic tools to characterize hypermutating Plasmodium falciparum.
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
Malaria kills 1-2 million people every year and causes illness in several 100 million individuals. The hunt for new drugs and vaccines must be complimented with a thorough understanding of how parasites mutate to evade therapeutic measures.
Some clones of the human malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum may... (more) |
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 | Lee W. Riley, M.D.
University of California - Berkeley | | Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Latency and Reactivation Tuberculosis
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
After AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) is the most common infectious cause of death in adults worldwide. One-third of the world’s population is infected with the organism Mycobacterium tuberculosis that causes TB. One can develop TB shortly after an infection, but most new TB cases in the world arise from those who are chronically... (more) |
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 | David S. Roos, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania | | Designing and Mining Pathogen Genome Databases: The Apicoplast as a Novel Drug Target in Plasmodium Parasites…and Other Stories
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
The excitement engendered by the completion of pathogen, vector, and human genome sequences is coupled with a concern: how are researchers to effectively exploit these data for drug and vaccine development?
Genomics research is characterized by the production of... (more) |
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 | Gary K. Schoolnik, M.D.
Stanford University School of Medicine | | The Molecular Ecology of Vibrio cholerae in the Gangetic Delta—Whole genome expression profiles as ecosystem bioprobes
2002 Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease
The legendary capacity of Vibrio cholerae, the agent of Asiatic cholera, to spawn global epidemics, is well known to medical historians. Its epicenter is the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in Bangladesh. There, localized outbreaks occur... (more) |
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