Faculty Achievements
Daniel Bausch, MD, MPH&TM, is an Associate Professor in the department and presently seconded to the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit 6 in Lima, Peru was elected to serve as the ASTMH Councilor. Doctoral Students and Post-Doctoral Fellow Achievements Dr. Berlin Londono, a post- doctoral fellow in the Kumar lab presented her previous work at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Louisiana Mosquito Control Association (LMCA) which was held from November 29 - December 1, 2011 at the Clarion Inn and Suites Conference Center in Covington, LA. Dr. Londono was selected to give a talk entitled "Mosquito breeding sited for Aedes aegypti along highways in Colombia in 2010". This 52 year Association's mission is to enhance the quality of life through the suppression of mosquitoes for all her in Louisiana. Dr. Seokyoung Kang, a post-doctoral fellow in the Hong lab was selected to appear on a Poster Walk at the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, held from December 4 - December 8 in Philadelphia. In his poster entitled "Human Dengue-Resistance Gene, FKBP1, is Functionally Conserved in Yellow Fever Mosquito Aedes aegypti", he presented his recent work on common human and mosquito-vector resistance genes against dengue virus infection. Alan Goggins and Kristen Merino, both doctoral students in the Kumar lab presented their work in the 2011 Biomedical Sciences (BMS) Scientific Retreat. The BMS retreat for 2011 was held on October 14, 2011 at the Audubon Zoo Education Area. The BMS student presentations that Kristen and Alan presented were poster formats where they discussed their work in progress for their dissertation. Alan Goggin's title for his poster was "Investigating the Transmission Blocking Efficacy of Antibodies against Plasmodium vivax Surface Antigen Pvs48/45". Kristen Merino presented her poster entitled "Investigating the B-cell response to disulfide bond-constrained epitopes in a malaria vaccine antigen". Mark Rider, a doctoral student in the Hong lab, presented a poster at the 60th annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. He discussed his work that used a proteomics approach to investigate the interactions between o'nyong nyong virus and its mosquito vector, Anopheles gambiae leading to the identification of several dysregulated proteins in infected mosquitoes that offer insight into the infection process and pathogenesis process in insect vectors and invertebrate hosts as well. Visiting Faculty DTM and the Tulane Center for Infectious Diseases co-sponsored a visit from November 9-11, 2011by Dr. Eduardo Gotuzzo, Director of the Tropical Medicine Institute at Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, Peru. Dr. Gotuzzo is a well-known and well-published authority on clinical tropical medicine, and he is co-director of the Gorgas Course in Clinical Tropical Medicine at the Tropical Medicine Institute, sponsored by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His special interests are in parasitic diseases, zoonotic bacterial diseases such as anthrax and leptospirosis, and clinical aspects of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in Peru. He spoke on "Multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis and its impact in the Americas" to the SPHTM and on "Clinical manifestations of HTLV-1 disease in Peru" at the New Orleans Intracity Infectious Diseases weekly conference. His visit reinforced research and training collaborations between Cayetano Heredia University and Tulane Tropical Medicine, including longstanding joint research on diarrheal diseases and pediatric tuberculosis with Dr. Richard Oberhelman and newer activities on vector borne diseases with Dr. Dawn Wesson and Dr. Daniel Bausch. Dr. Frederique Jacquerioz, also a faculty member in the DTM, is currently working with Dr. Gotuzzo at the Tropical Medicine Institute. SPHTM also sponsored a Health Office for Latin America directed by GHSD faculty member Dr. Valerie Paz-Soldan. Dr. Gotuzzo's visit is yet another aspect of the Tropical Medicine Department's rapidly expanding collaborations and research programs in Peru. Annual Student Picnic The Department of Tropical Medicine hosted the Annual Student Picnic this past October. The picnic gave the faculty, staff and students in the department a chance to relax and network with one another. For highlights, please see below.
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L to R: Kasi Guillot, Sr. Program Coordinator and DTM Students |
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Dr. Dawn Wesson, Mark Rider and
Dr. Donald Krogstad |
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Dibya Datta, Anusha Gopalakrishnan, Kristen Merino and Toni Hudson |
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