| Roberto Docampo,
a professor of veterinary pathology at the University of Illinois,
has been named the first Georgia Research Alliance Barbara and Sanford
Orkin Eminent Scholar in Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases and
Cellular Biology at UGA.
Docampo will hold his academic appointment in the department of
cellular biology. His wife, Silvia Moreno, will also join the UGA
faculty. In 2000, the Orkins, longtime Atlanta residents, gave UGA
$750,000 to create the professorship to strengthen programs in tropical
and emerging global diseases.
“Barbara and Sanford Orkin’s goal in creating this chair
was to help eradicate diseases that cause suffering and death for
millions of people around the world,” says President Michael
F. Adams. “Dr. Docampo’s appointment will significantly
bolster research at the University of Georgia to achieve that goal.
We are grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Orkin for helping strengthen our
biomedical initiative and for supporting work that has enormous
scientific as well as humanitarian value.”
Sanford Orkin expressed pleasure at the announcement.
“Barbara and I are very excited about the hiring of Dr. Docampo,”
he said. “The eradication of disease, especially in the Third
World, is of enormous significance, and we are delighted to be a
part of that important effort.”
The Georgia Research Alliance is a consortium of business, industry
and academic institutions that together work on solving the many
problems facing the state, country and world. The hub of the GRA
is the Eminent Scholars program, through which renowned scientists
are recruited from many parts of the world to lead research programs
with high potential economic development impact for the state. To
date, the GRA has recruited more than 40 Eminent Scholars. Areas
of research focus are primarily in advanced communications and the
biosciences and range from optical systems to structural biology.
Docampo is an international leader in the search for metabolic pathways
(in parasites) that may be essential for parasite survival but may
not find an equivalent counterpart in the host. Currently, Docampo’s
lab is concentrating its efforts on different biochemical mechanisms
used by parasites that cause malaria, African sleeping sickness,
leishmaniasis and Chagas’ Disease. Malaria is one of the planet’s
deadliest diseases and one of the leading causes of sickness and
death in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization,
there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases of malaria each year,
resulting in 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths.
Silvia Moreno, also an internationally recognized scientist, studies
the parasite Toxoplasma gondii,
the cause of toxoplasmosis. This pervasive parasite, which infects
about 20 percent of the people in the United States, has a global,
cosmopolitan distribution; the infection can be an especially devastating
disease in immunocompromised hosts, such as patients with HIV or
AIDS.
Docampo and Moreno are highly praised teachers, and arrive at UGA
with high rankings from former students. They will assume their
positions at UGA in January.
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