Tuesday, July 29, 2003

WRITER: Rebecca Ayer, 706/583-0578, alea@uga.edu
CONTACT: Pejman Rohani, 706/542-9249, rohani@uga.edu

UGA ECOLOGY PROFESSOR WINS AWARD TO PURSUE WORK IN
GLOBAL AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE

ATHENS, Ga. – Pejman Rohani, a University of Georgia scientist, has received a New Scholar Award in Global Infectious Disease from the Ellison Medical Foundation. Given to only 10 scientists each year, the award includes a four-year, $200,000 grant to support Rohani’s work in human health and population ecology. Rohani is an assistant professor of ecology and a member of UGA’s Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute.

The New Scholar Awards are given to biological and clinical scientists in the first three years of their research careers. Institutions are invited by the Ellison Medical Foundation to nominate candidates for the program and nominees are expected to have great promise as potential leaders of research in parasitology and infectious disease, particularly as applied to global health.

"Dr. Rohani's work will provide valuable insights into our understanding of outbreaks of serious human diseases and how they might be prevented," said UGA President Michael F. Adams. "His research is an excellent example of how the Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute is addressing global health issues, and we congratulate him on this prestigious award."

Rohani’s current research concerns the potential ecological interaction between different human diseases — more specifically, the possibility that there is a population level "interference" between different infections as they compete for susceptible hosts.

In a paper published in the April issue of Nature, Rohani and his team analyzed and modeled historical records of measles and whooping cough infections in 32 European cities from 1883 to 1932 before vaccinations became widely available and when diseases where significant killers in Europe. The team’s work predicts that when one disease removes enough susceptible hosts from a given population, whether by sequestration during convalescence or death, the rate of infection for the "competing" disease also goes down.

Epidemiological data from the period are consistent with the predicted interference effect of measles and whooping cough. When models of outbreaks for the two diseases are mapped simultaneously, given appropriate population demography, infections peak on an alternating two-year cycle.

Although Rohani’s research is still in the preliminary stages, the phenomenon could have definite public health implications, especially in developing countries where infectious disease remains a major cause of mortality.

"This concept is very much in its infancy," said Rohani. "After much work, however, it will allow us to better understand disease communities, predict when the epidemics’ different pathogens may interact with each other and how this may be used beneficially when designing vaccination programs."

Rohani joined the faculty of the Institute of Ecology in the UGA College of Environment and Design in January of 2002. His previous research position was as a Royal Society research fellow in the department of zoology at the University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. from Imperial College, University of London, in 1995.

The Ellison Medical Foundation was established by Lawrence J. Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp., to support biomedical research on aging and global infectious disease not funded by traditional sources or that might be underfunded in the United States.

Rohani is the second UGA faculty member to win an award from the Ellison Medical Foundation. In 2002, genetics professor Daniel Promislow was awarded an Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholars Award in Aging.

University nominations for the Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholars Awards are administrated through the Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute.

The Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute brings together UGA scientists who conduct health-related research. In addition to encouraging research collaboration, the institute is developing new interdisciplinary curricula in biomedical and health-related fields for graduate and undergraduate students at UGA.

For more information on the Ellis Medical Foundation, visit www.ellisfoundation.org; for information on Rohani’s work, see www.ecology.uga.edu/people/faculty/rohani.htm.

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