Registration is now open for the 29th Annual Molecular Parasitology & Vector Biology Symposium hosted by the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases. It will be held on Wednesday, May 1, 2019, at The Georgia Center on the University of Georgia campus in Athens, GA.
This day-long regional conference on parasites and host/parasite interaction draws more than 200 attendees from many departments at UGA and colleagues from other institutions throughout the United States.
As CTEGD is celebrating its 20th anniversary, 4 outstanding alumni have been invited to give spotlight presentations throughout the day in addition to the oral presentations from graduate students, postdocs, and senior researchers.
Invited Alumni Speakers:
James Morris, mentored by Kojo Mensa-Wilmot, is a professor in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry at Clemson University.
Matthew Collins, mentored by Rick Tarleton, is an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory University School of Medicine
Tiffany Weinkopff, mentored by Patrick Lammie, is an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Arkansas’s College of Medicine.
Marc-Jan Gubbels, mentored by Boris Striepen, is a professor in the Department of Biology at Boston College.
Oral and Poster Presentations
Graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other researchers are invited to present their research in either an oral or poster presentation. Abstracts for these presentations are due by April 12. During registration, please select Poster or Speak. An email will be sent to you with instructions on submitting your abstract. Please keep the following in mind when preparing your submission:
All abstracts must be submitted online by April 12, 2019, via the link in the email you received after registering.
Abstracts should include Title, Author(s), and Affiliation(s).
Abstracts should be 300 words or less, excluding title, author(s), and affiliation(s).
Notification of submission will be emailed to you.
Note: there has been issues of special characters (i.e. α and γ) not displaying in the submitted abstract. Therefore, please note the use of special characters by spelling out the word next to the symbol, e.g. IFN-γ (gamma) or β (Beta). The correction will be made during the editing process.
Abstracts will be published online by Wednesday, April 24.
Cost & Register
There is no cost to attend the Symposium or the full catered lunch, but registration is required.
Hotel Rooms: For those wishing to stay overnight, reservations can be made at The Georgia Center Hotel. The Holiday Inn is also nearby.
A $1.5 million initiative to upgrade labs across campus is enabling faculty members such as Regents Professor Michael Strand to enhance their research productivity. (Photo by Dorothy Kozlowski/ UGA)
Athens, Ga. – Labs and research support spaces across campus will be getting an upgrade, thanks to a $1.5 million presidential initiative that seeks to build on the university’s dramatic growth in research activity.
Presidential renovation funds have been distributed to nine schools and colleges and will be used to upgrade labs and replace core equipment that enables faculty members to conduct research and be more competitive in seeking grant funding. Proposals were solicited from deans and chosen based on links to college and university strategic priorities, as well as implications for faculty recruitment efforts and grant funding opportunities.
“To advance the research mission of the university and attract and retain outstanding faculty, we must support state-of-the-art facilities that assist the faculty with their groundbreaking work,” said President Jere W. Morehead. “I am pleased the institution has been able to help several faculty with critical needs, thanks to this initiative.”
In the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, an upgrade to an insectary that will be used to rear mosquitoes will enable Regents’ Professor and National Academy of Sciences member Michael Strand and several of his colleagues in the department of entomology to expand their research on infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. “We’re going to be able to do a whole series of experiments that we currently can’t do,” Strand said, adding that the upgraded facility opens up new opportunities for grants.
Upgrades to the Sensory Evaluation and Product Development Lab in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences will enable assistant professor Ginnefer Cox to develop and evaluate new food product formulations more efficiently while also giving students hands-on experiences and facilitating industry partnerships. “This new space is going to have equipment that helps train students to be the next product developers,” Cox said. “The upgrades also create more opportunities to collaborate in research with food companies, which opens up opportunities for students to interact with them and obtain internships and permanent employment.”
In the department of physics and astronomy, part of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, renovation funds will aid in faculty recruitment by modernizing an outdated laboratory. “We’re really excited to have received this funding,” said department head Phillip Stancil. “The space has been unused for the last several years, and with this renovation it’ll be ready for a new experimentalist to move in.”
Other schools and colleges that have received funding through presidential renovation funds are the College of Engineering, College of Environment and Design, Odum School of Ecology, College of Public Health, College of Veterinary Medicine and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.
Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Libby V. Morris noted that the lab renovation funds come at a time when sponsored research awards have increased by 34 percent over the past five years. It also coincides with recruitment initiatives that will bring up to 25 new faculty members to campus.
“Research activity at the University of Georgia has grown significantly in recent years, with strategic investments in faculty and facilities enabling discoveries that point the way to a healthier and more promising future,” Morris said.
Celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Southeast Flow Cytometry Interest Group (SEFCIG) with 4 days of educational training and scientific talks. SEFCIG was founded by Julie Nelson, the director of UGA’s CTEGD Cytometry Shared Resource Laboratory. The 10th Annual Meeting is being hosted on the University of Georgia campus in Athens, GA.
Special discounts are available to the UGA community and those attending SEFCIG, please email Tim Bushnell (timbushnell@expertcytometry.com) for details.
March 7 – TechnoFlow
Location: Paul D. Coverdell Building Room S175
11:00 – 12:00
Forensic Flow – Join us to test your skills at detecting bad flow data Jodi Kroeger, Moffitt Cancer Institute
12:00 – 1:00
Luncheon – Coverdell Rotunda
1:00 – 1:45
Multi-Dimensional Functional Profiling of Human Rhinovirus and Allergen- specific T-Cells By Means Of Spectral Flow Cytometry Liesbeth Paul and Joanne Lannigan, University of Virginia
1:45 – 2:30
Imaging and Spectral Cytometry go Viral! Joanne Lannigan, University of Virginia
2:30 – 3:15
High Dimensional Mass Cytometry Data Analysis Deon Bryant, Emory University
3:15 – 4:00
Next Generation Cell Sorting: New Technologies and Strategies Joe Trotter, Becton Dickinson
6:00 – 9:00
Opening Reception – Pecan Tree Galleria
March 8 – General Session
Location: Masters Hall, Georgia Center for Continuing Education
Flow in the South
9:00 – 9:10
Welcome and Introductions
9:10 – 9:55
Canine Breast Cancer Immunotherapy as a Model of Human Disease Curtis Bird, Auburn University
9:55 – 10:40
Single cell analyses of human B cell responses: Lessons from infectious disease and autoimmunity Jens Wrammert, Emory University
10:40 – 11:25
Using Flow Cytometry to Catch Parasites Sleeping Dennis Kyle, University of Georgia
11:25 – 12:00
Exhibits
Vendor Break Out Session with Box Lunches
12:00 – 2:45
Vendor Talks and Exhibits
Flow in the World
2:45 – 3:30
Extracellular Vesicle-Biome Analysis by Nanoscale High Resolution Flow Cytometry Terry Morgan, Oregon School of Health
3:30 – 4:15
Optimizing and validating FC-based EV measurements John Nolan, Scintillon Institute
4:15 – 5:00
Developing Flow Cytometry Assays to Support Clinical Trials Jake Jacobberger, Case Western
Courtney Murdock in her laboratory at the School of Veterinary Medicine (Photo by Dorothy Kozlowski/UGA)
Courtney Murdock, an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the College of Veterinary Medicine, the Odum School of Ecology and CTEGD, studies the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases to inform predictions about disease patterns and interventions to disrupt transmission.
Where did you earn degrees and what are your current responsibilities at UGA?
I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in biology with a minor in Spanish literature at the University of Michigan, where I also earned my Ph.D. in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. I was a postdoctoral researcher in the departments of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State University and am currently an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the department of infectious diseases in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine and the Odum School of Ecology.
When did you come to UGA and what brought you here?
I began my current position at UGA in 2014. I was excited to join the faculty here due to the growing expertise in infectious diseases across campus, having access to excellent colleagues in the College of Veterinary Medicine and the world-renowned Odum School of Ecology, and the plethora of resources available concerning facilities, expertise and support for graduate students.
What are your favorite courses and why?
My favorite courses that I took as an undergraduate and graduate student, and to teach as a professor, are ecology courses. Ecology is a modern science that is the study of the interactions among organisms and the environment. This field of study provides key insights into how the environment shapes interactions among organisms, their abundances, where they live, and our overall impact. Ecological knowledge is crucial for understanding and mitigating some of the biggest problems we will have to contend with in the future—some of which include global climate change, natural catastrophes, food and water scarcity, the evolution of antibiotic resistance, and emerging infectious diseases.
What are some highlights of your career at UGA?
My research on mosquito-borne diseases has been well-supported by agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, with total funding exceeding $1.2 million since 2014. These funds have supported laboratory research, as well as fieldwork in the U.S. and the Caribbean. The results of my research have been published in high-quality scientific journals of international standing, and my research findings have been cited nearly 1,000 times.
I also mentor 17 undergraduate students, one D.V.M. student, five Ph.D. students, and two postdoctoral researchers. All of my mentees gain hands-on experience working in an infectious disease system in the lab or field, as well as exposure to a diversity of host-parasite/pathogen systems and projects that are both basic and applied in nature. My students have a strong record of success, with two NSF Graduate Research Fellowships, four travel awards to attend international conferences to present their work, and two awards for presenting research at local venues.
How do you describe the scope and impact of your research or scholarship to people outside of your field?
I am interested in understanding what drives the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. The mosquito is the deadliest organism on this planet because of the harmful organisms it transmits to humans, wildlife and domestic animals. Many of these diseases cannot be treated with drugs or prevented with vaccines. Thus, only through an understanding of the transmission process will we be able understand when we are at most risk to contract these diseases, predict how current disease distributions might change in the future, and develop interventions that efficiently disrupt transmission.
How does your research or scholarship inspire your teaching, and vice versa?
For me there is quite a bit of cross-talk between my research knowledge and experiences and my teaching. One important goal as an instructor in the sciences is to impart a solid understanding of the scientific process. Many students who take my courses do not necessarily want a career in science. I believe that to be informed citizens, however, they need to be able to think critically about science and its contributions to society. The best way I have found outside of lab sections to impart this knowledge is from drawing on my own research experiences. I also have found that my teaching informs the direction of my research program because it encourages me to think about my research from the perspective of foundational concepts in ecology.
What do you hope students gain from their classroom experience with you?
In general, the learning objectives for my courses include understanding the conceptual foundations of ecology, becoming comfortable understanding and working with scientific data, being familiar with the scientific method, and being able to engage in discussion and make informed decisions about ecological and environmental issues.
On the less concrete side, I want them to wonder at how amazing the natural world is, be curious about it, understand our part and overall impact, and to be more informed, science-literate citizens.
Describe your ideal student.
Here are some characteristics I value in both undergraduate and graduate students that I work with (this is not ranked in any particular order):
Curiosity—always questioning why and how.
Self-starter—only you can advocate for your interests and education.
Life learner—there is no rubric for life; college and graduate school is the perfect place to begin learning how to teach yourself the material you need to know to pass the test, complete course objectives, fulfill job expectations, answer your own questions, etc.
Positive—this shapes everything, your outlook on life and work, general happiness, interactions with co-workers.
Hardworking – willing to do what is needed to get the task at hand done.
Creative – ability to think outside of the box, willingness to explore and adopt concepts from other fields in order to innovate or solve existing problems.
Team member – working effectively with people with different backgrounds, knowledge, working styles and personalities is a life skill that is beneficial across a diversity of situations and careers.
Fearless – failure is an opportunity to learn and grow.
Responsible – this goes beyond just being reliable and detail oriented. It involves taking ownership over success and failure as well as both positive and negative interactions with others.
Human – have outside interests, be respectful to others, empathize with others.
Courtney Murdock works with postdoc Christine Reitmeyer in the insectary, where they conduct research on mosquito-borne diseases. (Photo by Dorothy Kozlowski/UGA)
Favorite place to be/thing to near campus is…
… eating lunch at Cali N Tito’s with colleagues or members of my lab.
Beyond the UGA campus, I like to…
In addition to being a scientist and a professor, I am a mother of two kids, a wife, a daughter, a sister, and a friend. I spend as much time as I can manage with my family and friends outside of work. This involves simple things like going swimming with the kids at the YMCA, going to the local library, going to museums or Lego Land in Atlanta, playing at local parks when the weather is nice, hiking at Fort Yargo State Park or Sandy Creek Nature Center, and occasionally camping in the mountains of Georgia. We also spend a lot of our vacation visiting family in Chicago, Illinois, and Traverse City, Michigan.
Favorite book/movie (and why)?
Favorite nonfiction: “Devil in the White City.” I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, so it was really insightful and fun to read about how much of the city and world was shaped by the World Fair of 1893. There is also a side story involving a serial killer, which is totally gripping.
Favorite fiction: The “Outlander” series by Diana Gabaldon. These novels are historical fiction, mixed with fantasy and a pinch of romance. The characters are well developed, complex, and the history well researched, so is a perfect storm for losing oneself completely.
The one UGA experience I will always remember will be…
Every year my lab picks a themed costume and dresses up for Halloween. To me this is special, as it is an opportunity for our group to do something fun, wacky and together. Current pictures are on our website: https://www.themurdocklab.com/people.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I was an NCAA Division 1 scholar-athlete. I walked on to the University of Michigan softball team as a freshman during my undergraduate career. While I never started, I learned a lot of life skills from this experience that translate to my perspective on life, challenges, teamwork and leadership. I feel like there are stereotypes associated with student-athletes that are oftentimes unwarranted concerning their scholarship, and we should be mindful of this in our interactions with student-athletes in the classroom. I feel that they bring a lot of underappreciated assets to the table.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded University of Georgia researchers $1.956 million for a high-resolution mass spectrometer that will enhance capabilities for scientists in many fields across campus.
The award by the NIH High End Instrumentation program, which provides grants in the range of $600,000 to $2 million for a variety of expensive instrumentation, including MRI imagers, electron microscopes, DNA sequencers, and mass spectrometers, was one of 30 awards made in the program, and one of only six mass spectrometer requests funded in the 2018 cycle.
The grant funded a 12 Tesla Bruker Solarix FTMS, a high-resolution mass spectrometer capable of measuring molecular weights with precision accuracy that can be applied to molecules ranging in size from small metabolic products to intact proteins and protein complexes. It can also provide molecular structure through a multidimensional analysis method known as tandem mass spectrometry. The instrument will be used to support research in metabolomics and glycomics, the analysis of genetic, physiologic and pathologic aspects of sugar molecules involved in all biological process from modulating cell function to determining cancer development.
“This instrument will enhance the research capabilities for a number of scientists in chemistry, the biological sciences and biomedical research, and will help foster interdisciplinary research projects between groups in a number of departments and colleges at the university,” said Jon Amster, professor and head of the department of chemistry and principal investigator on the grant.
Over a dozen researchers will be major users of this instrument, which will be housed in the Amster laboratory in the department of chemistry.
“The new 12T FT-ICR instrument will greatly improve our ability to perform metabolomics analysis, especially regarding to the identification of unknown metabolites, since this instrument has higher accuracy and resolving power than the current instruments at UGA,” said Belen Cassera, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, member of the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, and co-principal investigator on the grant. “This type of grant can be particularly difficult to obtain and it is a privilege for me to be part of an amazing team of investigators that put together this application.”
“Virtually every metabolomics project we have going right now will benefit from this new instrumentation grant,” said Art Edison, GRA Eminent Scholar, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and a co-principal investigator on the grant. “High resolution mass spectrometry is a very important tool for the analysis of complex biological mixtures and unknown metabolite identification in applications ranging from human disease to carbon cycling in the ocean to model organisms for pathway analysis.”
Of the 104 NIH shared instrumentation grants made this year during 2018, only 10 were in the range of $1.9 million to $2 million.
Vaccines can be an efficient and cost-effective method of preventing and treating pathogen-induced illnesses. As new pathogens appear and old pathogens re-emerge, improved vaccines are needed. For one emerging global disease, Chagas Disease, effective vaccine development has long been elusive. Now, Rick Tarleton, Regents’ Professor in the department of cellular biology, and former graduate student Sam Kurup have received a patent for a vaccine method that improves efficacy. Even more promising, it can be used to develop vaccines for a variety of pathogens.
Chagas Disease, caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi and spread by blood-feeding insects commonly known as “kissing bugs”, is endemic to the Americas, including the U.S. The infection can result in irreparable damage to the heart and digestive system, and in Central and South America, it kills more than 50,000 people each year.
Tarleton and Kurup found that vaccines consisting of parasites that have been genetically modified to produce stronger pathogen-associated molecular patterns, or PAMPs, increase the immune response of the host. PAMPs are molecules associated with the pathogen that are recognized by the immune system. T. cruzi does not naturally produce strong PAMPs.
In mice vaccinated with transgenic T. cruzi expressing potent bacterial PAMPs, they saw a superior immune response and a more rapid and persistently stronger acquired immune response. Furthermore, in chronically infected mice, they also saw a boost in immune response and a reduction in parasite load. This is good news as presently available treatments are not completely effective and often have severe side effects.
The inability of classical adjuvants to induce innate immunity and to generate a long-lasting T-cell response in T. cruzi infection has been a hurdle in the development of T-cell-based vaccines. Using PAMPs-modified attenuated vaccines may be an ingredient for preventing and treating this and other pathogenic illnesses.
Daniel Colley visits a car wash in Kisumu, Kenya, one of his study sites for more than 20 years. Workers at the car wash drive vehicles into Lake Victoria, infecting and reinfecting themselves with schistosomiasis. (Photo courtesy of SCORE)
One day Daniel Colley raised his hand to volunteer, setting in motion five decades of scientific adventures. It was 1969, and Colley’s postdoctoral adviser, Byron Waksman, a renowned immunologist at Yale University School of Medicine, had stepped into the laboratory and asked if anyone wanted to go to Brazil.
“I have no idea why my hand shot up,” says Colley. “I didn’t know anything about Brazil. My wife and I didn’t even have passports. I asked Byron about the nature of the research, and he said, ‘Schistosomiasis.’ My response was, ‘What’s that?’”
Colley, today a UGA immunologist and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, became fascinated by schistosomiasis, a parasitic worm infection plaguing poverty-stricken communities in sub-Saharan Africa and around the world. Globally more than 250 million people are infected via contact with water that carries the parasites.
The waterborne worms penetrate human skin and take up residence in blood vessels. About 5 to 10 percent of infections progress to life-threatening disease over decades. But most people experience more subtle symptoms such as fatigue, anemia, wasting, malnutrition and impaired cognitive development.
“Children playing in the water are picking up these chronic parasitic infections,” he says, “so they are sick and don’t do as well in school. If kids don’t receive what they need to develop early in life, it can become a lifelong disability.”
This irrigation channel in a village in Niger is a schistosomiasis transmission site. The children exposed there were tested and treated as part of the Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation program, led by Colley. (Photo by Amadou Garba/SCORE)
After his Brazil sojourn, Colley arrived at Vanderbilt University in 1971, setting up a lab and beginning his career-long effort to understand the immunological paradox of schistosomiasis (or “schisto,” in the vernacular).
“The more I learned about schisto, the more interesting it became,” says Colley, who tweets as @SchistoKid. “It has a bizarre life cycle. Here’s a worm that can live inside your blood vessels for up to 40 years, though more typically it lasts for five to 10 years. Why doesn’t your immune system get rid of this creature sooner? That was a very intriguing question.”
In infected human blood vessels, the female worms produce eggs that the male fertilizes. Many of the eggs escape the human body in urine or feces. When people urinate or defecate in or near fresh water, the eggs can infect freshwater snails, where the parasite develops and rapidly multiplies. When worms re-enter fresh water, they can find human victims.
Meanwhile, the body’s remaining worm eggs are swept by the bloodstream into the gut wall and the liver or bladder, where they become lodged. The immune system fights these egg intruders with a delicate, two-pronged effort: First, masses of cells called granulomas wall off the eggs, isolating them from surrounding tissue and reducing disease. But the immune system must also regulate granuloma growth. For most people, this regulatory response keeps granulomas relatively small, but some grow over decades, eventually causing fibrosis and blocking blood flow through the liver, causing internal bleeding.
“Schisto is a very complex puzzle for an immunologist,” Colley says. “If you fail to have the initial immune response against the egg, you die. But if you fail to regulate this immune response against the egg over time, you die. How our immune system has co-evolved with schisto is fascinating to me, and I still haven’t figured out how it’s done.”
In 1992, he joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a year later was promoted to director of its Division of Parasitic Diseases. “I learned about a lot of other parasitic diseases. It was an incredibly broadening experience that became useful in my later work at UGA. From my colleagues, I gained knowledge in epidemiology—the incidence and prevalence of diseases and detecting the sources and causes of epidemics.”
He arrived at UGA in 2001 as professor of microbiology and director of the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, created only three years before. “UGA started the center and took risks by investing in it,” he says. “Now it’s globally famous for its work in parasitic diseases and has 23 principal investigators.”
During the past decade, Colley has been director of UGA’s Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation (SCORE), a program supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. SCORE scientists study strategies used in eight sub-Saharan African countries to control and eventually eliminate schistosomiasis. Today, most sub-Saharan African governments collaborate with the World Health Organization and a pharmaceutical company to provide a free drug, praziquantel, that treats existing infections and can significantly reduce new cases.
“SCORE has shown that mass interventions with praziquantel do work, and they are best done every year,” he says. SCORE researchers also helped develop a more rapid and precise diagnostic test for schistosomiasis, discovering many more cases in children than previously thought.
“The main message I’ve learned in my career is that diseases such as schisto are diseases of poverty,” he says. “Poverty contributes to these diseases, and poverty is also the result of them. If you are a stunted kid, and you have anemia, and your cognitive development is not great because of a parasite, it’s harder to succeed.
“People are the same everywhere—they all want a better life, and in some places, that’s not happening. Fighting these infections is an important part of making lives better.”
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Originally published at UGA Research.
